Reading on Paper is Faster than Reading on iPad or Kindle.

Though done with a small sample, this study seems to say reading on paper is faster than on Kindle 2 or on iPad with iBook application. PC World has an article about it here. the 24 people rated the reading experience about the same and the comprehension was similar through any of  the medium. The PC monitor was uniformly hated. probably because, as was pointed out by some, it reminded of the workspace.

It will be really interesting to find out why reading on paper is faster. of course, you would need a bigger study to establish that this is really so. the speed difference recorded was quite significant at 10% or thereabouts. There was a speed difference between reading Kindle 2 and the iPad. Kindle 2 came out to be slower even though the reading experience on it is closest to reading on paper.

Can the whole thing be due to the fact that reading a printed book is associated with relaxation, absence of stress, that makes the difference! This experiment was about reading short stories of Hemingway. Would reading text book, self development books and other such serious books give us a different result because of that association! Reading any of these books, may not be as relaxing an experience even on paper.

Super Quick Charger for Electric Cars

Biggest issue about electric cars is that when you run low on battery charge, you just cannot get into a station and fill up in a few minutes. Even the so called "quick chargers" take up to 30 minutes to charge batteries to 80%  capacity.

News comes of a charger development by a Japanese company JFE Engineering that have developed a charger that can charge car batteries to 50% capacity in 3 minutes and 70% capacity in 5 minutes. This was used to

actually run the Mitshubishi Electric car i-MiEV 80 kms continuously after a 5 minute charge. The car has a range of 160 kms after a full charge! We are going somewhere looks like! Whether out electrical grids be able to manage a significant number of cars charging at this rate is another issue that'll need a solution, of course.

In Love With a machine Voice!

There was a time, quite some time back, when machines talking back to you used to cause irritation! Looks like things are reversed now. People are falling in love with specific machine voices. Here is an interesting article on the same. The article talks about the voices people have come to depend on, the GPS voices that giving you direction for driving safely.

I wonder if that is the difference. You resent the elevator talking to you or the washing machine talking back. But, when you have started depending on something, it is easy to get attached. It will be really interesting to find why this is happening!

How Effective can CBTs be!

The computer based training or CBTs have been talked about practically since the advent of the multi-media  age in personal computing. the potential is obviously very high. But, not too many examples exist that really fully exploit the media. to my mind, nothing can explain concepts better than the multi media tools of animation, sound and video etc. However, the multimedia show can very easily degenerate into gimmickry unless done thoroughly.

We have included quite a few CBT projects this year. We need to push it to the levels of effectiveness where they can be tools we could use for teaching the corresponding subject. I really do need to push for the typical project management style we used to adopt for the software development industry.

CS 403: Advanced Computer Architecture

That this course is inappropriate for second year students of the CSE course of WBUT became even more evident to me couple of days back.Their finals are almost on them and some had questions about interconnection networks and how they are used in example systems.

For example there was one question about the ILIAC IV machine. The course also has mentions of the connection machine and other super computers. Possibly the best method for study of such systems is through assignments to different groups and presentation to the whole class.

Students who do not even have an exposure to the OS, programming, let alone issues involved in parallel programming will have such a hard time understanding the issues. So they will resort to rote learning and the whole purpose is defeated. Prescribing advanced Architecture for second year students is absolutely wrong!

DRDO vs. Armed Forces

There was a flare up on the "Technology Day" between the Defence R&D Organization and the services high ups in the presence of the prime minister and the defence minister.This has been a on-going feud. I remember it so vividly from the time I was part of DRDO.

On the one hand was bad management of DRDO projects. I sincerely believe the main problem was project management. That's how we have these horror stories of never ending projects like the main battle tank. some of the missile programmes and so on. Many a times the technology proposed would be comparatively old. There was always the risk of our enemies being technologically advanced.

On the other hand we had the problem of faith in the indigenous technology by the armed forces. Beside, there was this lure of getting trained abroad when technology was imported. There were obviously some added considerations too when such technology purchases are decided. All in all it used to like, DRDO cannot deliver anything worthwhile! Things changed somewhat recently when at least some meaningful systems were delivered to the forces and they got inducted.

Until DRDO is able to deliver comparable technology to what's available in US, Europe etc. this feud will remain. I also have a strong feeling that, unless the R&D model follows what US and European countries do, is followed, the devlopments would not meet the world standards.

IITs Going Online

Today's papers talked about a plan by the premier technical education institutes to go online so that a much larger segment of students can access the course material. This is going to take couple of years. What is of concern though, is if the standards of the students taking these courses will be at par with the students who sit in the classes and take the regular exams etc.

This is central to all off-campus curses conducted by any university. It is generally considered to of lower grade than attending full time at a brick and mortar institution. Today, you can have any kind of access, touch points that a regular institution provides through  the Internet. The central issue is if appropriately designed. I am sure any educational plan designed by the IITs can take care of such issues.

More crucial question is can the standards be maintained with such on-line access.Unless that can be done, when a graduate coming out through the regular program and a student finishing the course on-line are indistinguishable, such a program can be meaningful. This problem is central to the perception that all such distance learning courses suffer from. I wonder how they are going to ensure the uniformity of the quality!