Punjabi By Nature

An India Educated

Universal education is indeed a laudable goal, but I think we can start with something simpler. One of the questions, organizations ask is that are we reaching the customers who really matter?
Similarily, one can ask - can we educate the people who really matter? That in turn can create a juggernaut and virtuous cycle that one hopes for. At Microsoft a lot of educational campaigns fell under the rubric of TTT (Train the Trainer) i.e. you train the trainer and then he/she will go out and train many others. So, from each one, teach one, you get to each one, teach many. I think there is a lesson to be learnt (no pun intended) from the marketing behemoth.

How much does it take to educate? According to one of the well known action groups for education (ASHA) http://www.ashanet.org/index.php?page=sac you can support a child in $10 per month. At $120 per year, if we have to educate say 20% (240 million) of the population, that will take roughly $30 billion every year. That is a tall oder indeed, so we need to be creative in our use of resources (time, money, and knowledge) Can technology build a highly scalable solution?

But there is a broader theme to education. Is education only available in schools? How is it that some executives who are extremely well educated display poor ethical and moral values, where as some illiterate people are steadfast honest and upright. I think we need to think beyond the classroom education to education that spreads better values.

Why is Connectivity So Expensive in India

Atanu Dey has a good article on "Why is connectivity so expensive in India"

Here are my little thoughts...

I am not sure if this has already been said, but I dont think there are enough broadband users (demand) in the country. Granted, the high cost may be a barrier, but then its a chicken and egg problem. I think what India is facing is the early market phase, where adoption is on the upswing but the early adopters pay a price for being so few in numbers. I believe that India with its very high tele-density cities and ability to leapfrog the old telecom infrastructure elsewhere in the world will eventually witness cheaper broadband access than most any part in the world. Just look at what happened to the cost of the cell phone calls!

One more thing to worry about here is the “quality” of the connection. Are we really getting world class quality broadband connections? If yes, then we are fine. If no, then we have to bring the quality bar up as well. I use Airtel in Delhi and their service is quite good and I have hardly ever faced a problem. However, one could do with higher speeds.. Ah.. Oliver asked for more!

Blink: The Power Of Thinking Without Thinking

Blink is about the first two seconds of looking--the decisive glance that knows in an instant. Gladwell, the best-selling author of The Tipping Point, campaigns for snap judgments and mind reading with a gift for translating research into splendid storytelling. Building his case with scenes from a marriage, heart attack triage, speed dating, choking on the golf course, selling cars, and military maneuvers, he persuades readers to think small and focus on the meaning of "thin slices" of behavior. The key is to rely on our "adaptive unconscious"--a 24/7 mental valet--that provides us with instant and sophisticated information to warn of danger, read a stranger, or react to a new idea.

Gladwell includes caveats about leaping to conclusions: marketers can manipulate our first impressions, high arousal moments make us "mind blind," focusing on the wrong cue leaves us vulnerable to "the Warren Harding Effect" (i.e., voting for a handsome but hapless president). In a provocative chapter that exposes the "dark side of blink," he illuminates the failure of rapid cognition in the tragic stakeout and murder of Amadou Diallo in the Bronx. He underlines studies about autism, facial reading and cardio uptick to urge training that enhances high-stakes decision-making. In this brilliant, cage-rattling book, one can only wish for a thicker slice of Gladwell's ideas about what Blink Camp might look like.

From http://www.gladwell.com/blink/index.html ....

1. What is "Blink" about?

It's a book about rapid cognition, about the kind of thinking that happens in a blink of an eye. When you meet someone for the first time, or walk into a house you are thinking of buying, or read the first few sentences of a book, your mind takes about two seconds to jump to a series of conclusions. Well, "Blink" is a book about those two seconds, because I think those instant conclusions that we reach are really powerful and really important and, occasionally, really good.

You could also say that it's a book about intuition, except that I don't like that word. In fact it never appears in "Blink." Intuition strikes me as a concept we use to describe emotional reactions, gut feelings--thoughts and impressions that don't seem entirely rational. But I think that what goes on in that first two seconds is perfectly rational. It's thinking--its just thinking that moves a little faster and operates a little more mysteriously than the kind of deliberate, conscious decision-making that we usually associate with "thinking." In "Blink" I'm trying to understand those two seconds. What is going on inside our heads when we engage in rapid cognition? When are snap judgments good and when are they not? What kinds of things can we do to make our powers of rapid cognition better?

2. How can thinking that takes place so quickly be at all useful? Don't we make the best decisions when we take the time to carefully evaluate all available and relevant information?

Certainly that's what we've always been told. We live in a society dedicated to the idea that we're always better off gathering as much information and spending as much time as possible in deliberation. As children, this lesson is drummed into us again and again: haste makes waste, look before you leap, stop and think. But I don't think this is true. There are lots of situations--particularly at times of high pressure and stress--when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions offer a much better means of making sense of the world.

One of the stories I tell in "Blink" is about the Emergency Room doctors at Cook County Hospital in Chicago. That's the big public hospital in Chicago, and a few years ago they changed the way they diagnosed heart attacks. They instructed their doctors to gather less information on their patients: they encouraged them to zero in on just a few critical pieces of information about patients suffering from chest pain--like blood pressure and the ECG--while ignoring everything else, like the patient's age and weight and medical history. And what happened? Cook County is now one of the best places in the United States at diagnosing chest pain.

Not surprisingly, it was really hard to convince the physicians at Cook County to go along with the plan, because, like all of us, they were committed to the idea that more information is always better. But I describe lots of cases in "Blink" where that simply isn't true. There's a wonderful phrase in psychology--"the power of thin slicing"--which says that as human beings we are capable of making sense of situations based on the thinnest slice of experience. I have an entire chapter in "Blink" on how unbelievably powerful our thin-slicing skills are. I have to say that I still find some of the examples in that chapter hard to believe.

3. Where did you get the idea for "Blink"?

Believe it or not, it's because I decided, a few years ago, to grow my hair long. If you look at the author photo on my last book, "The Tipping Point," you'll see that it used to be cut very short and conservatively. But, on a whim, I let it grow wild, as it had been when I was teenager. Immediately, in very small but significant ways, my life changed. I started getting speeding tickets all the time--and I had never gotten any before. I started getting pulled out of airport security lines for special attention. And one day, while walking along 14th Street in downtown Manhattan, a police van pulled up on the sidewalk, and three officers jumped out. They were looking, it turned out, for a rapist, and the rapist, they said, looked a lot like me. They pulled out the sketch and the description. I looked at it, and pointed out to them as nicely as I could that in fact the rapist looked nothing at all like me. He was much taller, and much heavier, and about fifteen years younger (and, I added, in a largely futile attempt at humor, not nearly as good-looking.) All we had in common was a large head of curly hair. After twenty minutes or so, the officers finally agreed with me, and let me go. On a scale of things, I realize this was a trivial misunderstanding. African-Americans in the United State suffer indignities far worse than this all the time. But what struck me was how even more subtle and absurd the stereotyping was in my case: this wasn't about something really obvious like skin color, or age, or height, or weight. It was just about hair. Something about the first impression created by my hair derailed every other consideration in the hunt for the rapist, and the impression formed in those first two seconds exerted a powerful hold over the officers' thinking over the next twenty minutes. That episode on the street got me thinking about the weird power of first impressions.

4. But that's an example of a bad case of thin-slicing. The police officers jumped to a conclusion about you that was wrong. Does "Blink" talk about when rapid cognition goes awry?

Yes. That's a big part of the book as well. I'm very interested in figuring out those kinds of situations where we need to be careful with our powers of rapid cognition. For instance, I have a chapter where I talk a lot about what it means for a man to be tall. I called up several hundred of the Fortune 500 companies in the U.S. and asked them how tall their CEOs were. And the answer is that they are almost all tall. Now that's weird. There is no correlation between height and intelligence, or height and judgment, or height and the ability to motivate and lead people. But for some reason corporations overwhelmingly choose tall people for leadership roles. I think that's an example of bad rapid cognition: there is something going on in the first few seconds of meeting a tall person which makes us predisposed toward thinking of that person as an effective leader, the same way that the police looked at my hair and decided I resembled a criminal. I call this the "Warren Harding Error" (you'll have to read "Blink" to figure out why), and I think we make Warren Harding Errors in all kind of situations-- particularly when it comes to hiring. With "Blink," I'm trying to help people distinguish their good rapid cognition from their bad rapid cognition.

5. What kind of a book is "Blink"?

I used to get that question all the time with "The Tipping Point," and I never really had a good answer. The best I could come up with was to say that it was an intellectual adventure story. I would describe "Blink" the same way. There is a lot of psychology in this book. In fact, the core of the book is research from a very new and quite extraordinary field in psychology that hasn't really been written about yet for a general audience. But those ideas are illustrated using stories from literally every corner of society. In just the first four chapters, I discuss, among other things: marriage, World War Two code-breaking, ancient Greek sculpture, New Jersey's best car dealer, Tom Hanks, speed-dating, medical malpractice, how to hit a topspin forehand, and what you can learn from someone by looking around their bedroom. So what does that make "Blink?" Fun, I hope.

6. What do you want people to take away from "Blink"?

I guess I just want to get people to take rapid cognition seriously. When it comes to something like dating, we all readily admit to the importance of what happens in the first instant when two people meet. But we won't admit to the importance of what happens in the first two seconds when we talk about what happens when someone encounters a new idea, or when we interview someone for a job, or when a military general has to make a decision in the heat of battle.

"The Tipping Point" was concerned with grand themes, with figuring out the rules by which social change happens. "Blink" is quite different. It is concerned with the smallest components of our everyday lives--with the content and origin of those instantaneous impressions and conclusions that bubble up whenever we meet a new person, or confront a complex situation, or have to make a decision under conditions of stress. I think its time we paid more attention to those fleeting moments. I think that if we did, it would change the way wars are fought, the kind of products we see on the shelves, the kinds of movies that get made, the way police officers are trained, the way couples are counseled, the way job interviews are conducted and on and on--and if you combine all those little changes together you end up with a different and happier world.

Engineering Excellence

The software industry is littered with companies, big and small, who exist solely because they produce and sell "software". If there was a way that they could make all this money without writing software, they would! However, it is quite surprising that very little attention is paid to writing quality code. The process of delivering projects at times has taken overwhelming precedence to quality or the art of programming.

I have always believed that writing software is a creative and artistic profession. Many years ago, when I first saw the code that Dave Cutler wrote for NT, I was so mesmerized that I did not want to touch it, lest I spoil it :-)

With this brief background (there is a lot more to say here) I embark upon these series to share with the developer fraternity some of my experiences and what I have learnt over the years from my mentors and the gurus of programming.

Please let me know your feedback about the series in general or a particular topic specifically.

The purpose of this series is to:
•Help you get up to speed as an effective developer
•Prepare you for long-term success in your career

You will understand how to:
(1) Use Product Cycle Model for success
(2) Schedule projects
(3) Design great software
(4) Document your designs
(5) Make hard design decisions
(6) Achieve performance and reliability in your product
(7) Work successfully with other disciplines
(8) Reduce bugs by testing your code thoroughly
(9) Avoid legal and geo-political issues
(10) Design and write world-ready products
(11) Write production quality code
(12) Design and write secure code
(13) Speak so people listen
(14) Have productive spec, design, and code reviews
(15) Debug your code effectively
(16) Write effectively
(17) Develop your career

For God, Country, and Coca-Cola:

The book is a fascinating read for anyone who is interested in a great western icon...

Incidentally Asa Candler's story of how he obtained the coca cola concoction from John Pemberton draws a parallel to what Bill Gates did to get DOS, later rechristened MS-DOS.

How did an innocuous soft drink, more than 99% sweetened water, come to be regarded as "the sublimated essence of all that America stands for"?

For God, Country & Coca-Cola is a cultural, social, and economic history of America as seen through the green glass of a Coke bottle. And what a quintessentially American tale it is. Coca-Cola began humbly as a patent medicine amid the fervor and chaos of Reconstruction Atlanta. A shrewd marketeer saw its value as a beverage, and it rapidly grew through the Gilded Age to become the dominant consumer product of the American Century.

The key to Coca-Cola's success was ubiquitous advertising, as the Company's master myth-makers first created and then quenched the thirst of a nation. And when World War II carried American troops overseas, the soft drink went as well, laying the foundation for an enduring and lucrative presence.

Drawing on previously untapped archival sources, For God, Country & Coca-Cola paints vivid portraits of the entrepreneurs who led the Company: pious Methodist Asa Candler, who nourished the fledgling enterprise across the threshold of a century; cigar-chomping Robert Woodruff, who hosted presidents at his Georgia plantation; the aristocratic Roberto Goizueta, whose cosmopolitan background gave him the vision to reach global markets; aggressive Doug Ivester, the self-styled "wolf" who declared war on other soft drinks; and now Doug Daft, the Australian CEO who has turned the company on its head by laying off 20% of the workforce.

All have left indelible imprints on Coca-Cola. Here, too, is a colorful supporting cast of hustlers, ad men, zealots, and capitalist missionaries who have made the soft drink the most recognizable trademark in the world. Despite its occasionally tarnished image, the Company has marched zealously forward with its cherished product -- and its global conquest.

Provocative, controversial, and always entertaining, For God, Country & Coca-Cola reveals how Coke has irrevocably transformed our world. As family saga, cultural history, and, finally, the complete story of an American icon, this book is "the Real Thing."

Is Network Computing real?

A recent New York Times article writes about the "Network as the Computer" vision..

Interesting... Whilst this kind of computing idea is en vogue and its fashionable to write about it, history, consumers, and the future trends seem to be saying something else.

(1) We know the fate of Network Terminals and other such clients..
(2) We want to buy devices with more local storage, and computing, not less. Customers want to do all things locally, if they can. Just look at the cellphones, how they have gone from thin clients to thick clients!
(3) Even if you assume, for a moment that the networking speed has vastly improved for me to access computing that is spread out it still does not do away with the fragmented storage problem. For e.g. let us say that everyone had a thin client, and connected with a high speed networking connection to a server. The problem is that now there are many "servers" between which you need to reconcile your personal data. Today, you see this problem - you have contacts/mails at Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail and they are "not" synchronized. This problem is nothing new. It exists today in the silos of data that enterprises have today. It is known as the schema reconciliation and entity mapping problem.