Today's question!

While checking my emails I just happened to notice this yahoo ad on my browser -

Yahoo presents 'Ask the Planet 2006'. Answer the world's biggest questions. And win the world's coolest prices. Today's question - What's the trick to living in the moment?

Well, I would like to hear what you guys think about "the trick" to living in the moment... I am not sure if there is any one "trick" to it... :)

But anyway herez the Yahoo Answers website. It seems like a fun site with questions in various categories like Books and Authors, Arts & Humanities etc. etc... In each of these categories, they also have open questions, resolved questions and undecided questions. I was looking at some of the resolved questions and was really wondering about the creditability and authenticity of that information. Not sure if they have a set of editors or administrators who govern what kind of questions and answers go there. You can of course rate each other's questions and answers but I wonder how much that helps in trusting the source of the information. It also seems more like a discussion group thing and just a random fun place that feels like a public chat room; where people are asking random questions, their own personal questions and problems or wanting to know what people in general think about say a certain product etc etc.... Newayz, I think if you seriously want some veritable information, then wikipedia would be a better place!

Kya aisa bhi hota hai???

Last weekend it rained like cats and dogs and thanks to the heavy rains; a lot of places got flooded. For example - the loading dock in my apartment building was flooded - the cars were half in water; the roof at the reception was leaking; the electric room was flooded and ya, the boiler got damaged and the tranformer got bursted... I am sure you are wondering if this was the next tsunami hit area or what??

So as you must have already guessed - because the transformer got bursted - bijli chali gai!! (translation: the electricity went off).. and this happened on the auspicious day of 25th June, 2006 and i-am-sure-you-cant-guess-this but us din se aaj tak bijli wapas aai hi nahi!!!! (translation: since then the electricity is not back yet!).... It is amazing that its been four days that the technicians have been working on a 24 hour basis and they still havent fixed the problem. (I think they need to take a step back and revisit what exactly is the problem and what they are trying to solve...:p)...

So since the last few days; every few hours I call my apartment and this is how it goes...

Lady at the front desk: Hullo, this is Anne (name changed) speaking; how may I help you? (sounding very polite and nice...)

Me: Mmmm hi, I would like to know if the electricity is back?

Lady at the front desk: No its not yet back but they are working on it. (sounding nice...)

Me: Do you have any idea when it will be back?

Lady at the front desk: No we dont.

Me: ok thanks, bye.

Lady at the front desk: bye.

And the phone clicks. After a couple of hours I call again - this time I try to be a little more polite...not that I am not polite but still; just in case that motivates her to push the technicians and at least give me an estimate of when it might be back (I have Great Expectations!!)...

Lady at the front desk: Hullo, this is Anne (name changed) speaking; how may I help you? (sounding very busy and quick...)

Me: Hi, I would like to inquire if the electricity in the building is back yet?

Lady at the front desk: No its not!! And they're workin on it!! (highly busy and irritated...)

Me: Do you think you can give an estimate of when it might be back?

Lady at the front desk: No we can't give you an estimate ma'am but they're working on it!!! (frustrated...)

Me: ok thanks, bye.

Lady at the front desk: bye.

Arrrggghhh this doesnt work and my patience is exhausting now.... Another call towards the end of the day and I am just very frustrated and impatient.

Lady at the front desk: Hullo, this is Anne (name changed) speaking; how may I help you? (this sounds veryyy mechanical now...)

Me: Is the electricity back?? (I noticed I dint even say hi, hello etc etc.. )

Lady at the front desk: No its not back and we dont know when it will be but they're workin on it!! (whoa did she reallyyy guess it was me and anticipate the next line of questions!! or has she been attending tooo many of these calls by now...)

Me: thanks!!!

click click... wow, I cant believe this is happening for the last 4 days!!!! Now I am just soooo sure that they have lost the focus of the problem!!... they probably got side tracked and started fixing something else instead!!!... Or may be they are just spending their time pretending to work and are probably chatting or doing something else!... probably the problem is not that big and they are just using the latest buzz words to show its really big and killing time and earning money... anyway, I am just extremely curious to know what those technicians are doing there!!!... May be I should go and help... May be I would have solved the problem much better and faster!!!

At the end of the 4th day I reach home at night and ask the front desk -

Me: What exactly is wrong??

He: The boiler etc. in the electric room has got damaged as the room got flooded and they need to change parts etc.

Me: oh ok. but does it take soo long to change and fix parts?

He: oh but there are tooo many!!!!

Me (Finding it hard to control my giggles) : Well ya, but they are working 24/7.

He: yes, but its complicated.

Me: oh ok. thanks anyway.

I am back to being patient now and just hoping that they fix it soon and most of all I am praying that they test whatever-it-is-they-are-doing well; coz you dont want another short circuit or another fire and some damage after waiting this long coz it really is an ordeal to take a cold shower in the morning!!! Everything else is manageable and trivial except the cold shower and I have to literally literally prepare myself before I get into the shower and grace my neighbours with the auspicious screams and the oohs-and-aahs caused by the cold water trickling through your body...

Anyway, till date nobody has been able to answer what exactly is wrong, where, why, and how its going to be fixed and when... btw, in case you are wondering this is not some remote village in india or some developing country, but the so-called-capital-of-the-world : Washington D.C. where you find yourself wondering Kya aisa bhi hota hai?? (translation: Does this happen too??)

Nike+iPod

I came across this interesting blog post by Bradley Horowitz. Seems like a cool application where shoes talk to the iPod to communicate the distance, speed etc. of the runner....

I wonder if it chooses the songs based on this information - something like a dynamic adaptive playlist may be.... How about also having shared playlists, shared favorites etc. among the community of runners running on those same tracks, or community of runners based on their running speed, distance etc...

Making Choices

All of us are faced with making choices of different kinds at different points in time. Some choices are more important and difficult and have a long term effect - For example - choosing a school from the various admits; accepting a job offer among the various job offers; choosing a life partner, choosing an investment, choosing a house to buy etc etc... Some other choices are much more mundane and mechanical and are quickly forgotten - like - choosing what to wear to work; choosing which restaurant to go out and eat, choosing a movie to watch etc. etc...

I have been thinking about how exactly do we make these choices? What are the different factors that influence these choices -

(1) Are they influenced by the unsaid/implicit and explicit rules in the society,
(2) By what are peers do/dont do,
(3) By what our role-models do/dont do,
(4) By what members of our family have/have not to say?,
(5) By our past experiences,
(6) By our sense of intuition,
(7) By our superstitious beliefs,
(8) By the astrological advisors,
(9) By our analytical skills,
(10) By our power of reasoning,
(11) By our desire to satisfy our ego!,
(12) By the recognition and realization of our own strenghts and weaknesses.

(Some of these factors are candidates for a whole new topic of discussion!).

How much weight do these factors have on our final choice. Does the weightage change based on the circumstances? When is it that we find it difficult to make a choice - Which of these factors are in conflict then?? What kind of people give importance to what kind of factors - For example - does a scientific mind make its choice based on analytical and reasoning skills as compared to a religious mind that might choose based on beliefs etc... What kind of conflicts arise among these group of minds when it comes to making choices within an organization or a family etc. etc...

On a more technical side; the recommendation systems (like Amazon) are basically trying to influence your choice using point (2) - what our peers do; where they define peers as people who have bought similar items that you have bought in the past - This is a very weak notion but given the limited amount of information about user's activity on the website and the privacy issues; it is not a bad start.... It would be interesting to see what your peers dont do or what people who are not your peers do or dont do?

Yahoo Is Touching Up Its Photo-Sharing Service

MIT Technology Review article - Nothing innovative here; and I think Yahoo should have done this long back!!!

Sarabhai v/s Sarabhai

Sarabhai v/s Sarabhai is a reallyyyy hilarious Indian sitcom that comes on Star One :). I just came across some of its episodes on youtube. If people like Indian sitcoms like 'Tu Tu Main Main' that used to come long back on DD-2 I think, or even if you enjoy watching sitcoms like 'Everybody Loves Ray'; then I think you will love this one. :) ... It's just tooooo funny.... :))..

The characters are well crafted and everybody seems to be doing a very good job with acting. The performances are just sooo natural... Nobody is camera shy or camera conscious and they just jell with each other so much on screen - very comfortable and natural - its just tooo good!! :) . The only character I find a bit irritating is Mr. Rosesh!!... but anyway, i still like it... :)

MSR India

Microsoft Research's newest lab in Bangalore, India - An article interviewing Kentaro Toyama, assistant director of Microsoft Research in Bangalore, India. I like the vision that they have for research in India. An excerpt -

The six research areas we're currently focusing on are photography; digital geographies, which includes any kind of digital map or location-based services and software; multilingual systems, including speech recognition, natural language processing, and building systems that interact across different languages; hardware for communications, including distributed sensor networks; software engineering, which looks at creating tools that make software development easier; and emerging markets, or how computing will impact social and economic development.

All these ideas are interesting and worth exploring and some of them (like multilingual systems) have a huge potential in a place as diverse as India. I also feel that the socio-economic disparity will slow the pace for most of what they envision. Though this disparity might soon be disappearing - you never know!.

Anyway, I particularly am interested and like the idea of being able to search and return results without having any kind of language barrier that exists today. Makes me wonder - Will the problem of imprecise user queries decrease if the search engine was adapted to the user's language? Will we need novel interfaces to support these different languages? Will the searching, indexing etc. be done in the target language itself or assuming that we have cross-language ontologies, will we convert/translate from that other language to English, search in English and then translate back to that language? (This is something similar to what happens in Speech Recognition (SR) today - speech is converted to text, you search on this indexed English text and then return the corresponding audio/video files containing that text). What kind of information will we lose in switching back and forth between languages? Will the kind of information lost, be different if we switched from say Marathi to English as compared to French to English or say Russian to Chinese?