New Direction in Training

I always thought interactions are the heart of any training. Here's a confirmation. Even classroom, instructor led trainings are getting remodeled to introduce increasing amounts of interactive periods interspersed with "lecture" ESRI have introduced this model now and finds it very effective. Read about the details via the link.
Esri ArcWatch December 2010 - Esri Charts a New Direction in Training

Android 3.0 Gets Shown Off on Prototype Android Tablet « Specs, Reviews, News and Price Info - MobileWhack.com

Android development is speeding up. The version 2.3 has just been out and comes news that the version 3 is getting ready. Android based phones and the tablets have been identified as a tidal wave that will overtake the Apple devices in the two categories. So, no wonder, Android development will make that happen esily by giving the developers finer tools along the way!

Android 3.0 Gets Shown Off on Prototype Android Tablet « Specs, Reviews, News and Price Infhas just been out and comes news of the version 3.0 getting ready!o - MobileWhack.com

Google Bookstore Opens « SEO and Tech

EBooks are possibly going to be everywhere. They are destined to become the main way people would read books, textbooks as well as for entertainment. The following news is certainly a sign of the times! Kindle and then all kinds of readers started the huge movement to electronic books. Then there was this disruptive device from Apple, the iPad! And what a disruption. Most people think this is going to be the reader of choice and I concur with that. This is the device that can add value. Show off color illustrations. Besides it would be able to use all the multimedia data too. The ereaders are limited by the display they use, that was created to copy the familiar printed page paradigm. Color ereaders will be able to add color too but not animation, not video that really adds value to books!Now Google has opened a store for these electronic books! It was just Amazon followed by Barnes & Noble supplying the static books. I am sure the multimedia books would start coming soon.

Google Bookstore Opens « SEO and Tech

Are Amazon, Netflix, Google Making Too Many Decisions For Us?

That article on Forbes focuses on how we depend on technology to take a lot of decisions on technology and corresponding devices. The issue the writer, Joel Delman, asks the question whether we should depend on technology so much and depend entirely on them. To my mind there's another angle to this whole thing. As technology gets into suggesting songs I would like, drives my car, navigates to my destination etc. there is this distinct possibility that all this can be manipulated. Someone van really manipulate the technology to affect many of us in a planned manner. So, you need checks and balances to prevent such eventuality. Usually, these get overlooked in the initial glow of the technology capabilities and developing the checks and balances may take a back seat and be quite late. At the rate technology is moving, there will an overload of these overdue controls. Who's going to manage all these!

Are Amazon, Netflix, Google Making Too Many Decisions For Us? - Forbes.com

Why The Internet Is Not Disrupting TV � Podcasting News

That is an interesting angle to check! Until broadband was on the scene, you could say that the experiences on the two medium are not the same. If do have the broadband, as is available now, you could check apple to apple. Though the following article takes a look at why the Internet content has not won over that of TV, it is not cler if they have taken this issue into account. one of the factor could easily be that we like the passivity of TV watching and that little bit of activity with the romote, compared to actively finding content in the net!

Why The Internet Is Not Disrupting TV � Podcasting News

7 Fantastic Free Social Media Tools for Teachers

For all teachers, take a look at this and see if this makes sense in your specific teaching environment!!

7 Fantastic Free Social Media Tools for Teachers

Best Way to Teach!

We had a fairly huge debate over what is the best method for teaching. Is it the chalk & talk or presentation based, interactive one.Everyone kind of agreed interactivity is essential. But we had a divergence of opinion on what constitutes the interactivity.

I expected more accepted more of tendency towards the newer methods.One of the clear reason that emerged was that whatever method one is used to is what they want to continue to use. This is such a big issue to change in any sphere of human activity! We are so used to, so comfortable with familiarity of whatever we do! I would have thought, those who are in the teaching business would experiment more with their tools, methods etc.

What is a Text Book is Evolving Right Before Our Eyes!

What is going to be the form of the books, text books in particular! That some form of electronic reading will take over is almost certain. Is the ereader device going to win or the tablet computer ? That is not clear at the moment. The eReader  completely copies the printed book reading experience. That, to my mind, is a faulty approach. With a new approach we need not follow something existing! Multi media experience in imparting knowledge has been hyped about for a longtime. I can easily agree with that. Somebody reading about a Cheetah, can definitely gain from the sound recording of its roar/call and nothing will establish the fact that it is the fastest animal by a video clip.


There is no way a ereader can incorporate the multi-media data into a book. Even illustrations, which often best done as an animated piece can never be included in a eReader. In the present avatar, even color cannot be presented. Tablets can tackle all those issues very easily. besides it can be your link to the Internet and run you productivity applications too. It has to win in the long run. the eReader too will co-exist for those situations where you want to curl up with a book like item!

Another Feedback about Our Students being Weak in Communication

We had representatives of the Indian Army visiting us today for initial selection to their technical branches such as Engineers, EME and the Signals. At the end of day they did tell us our boys were weak in listening & comprehension as well as speaking. Our students come from Bengali background as well as fro Bihar, Jharkhand area.


Bengal boys were generally weak in speaking English back in our time too. But what happened during the intervening period was that we got rid of English from school curriculum for a very long time. That screwed up the situation further! Bihar and Jharkhand had the problem for a long time as well.


Interestingly we have a peculiar situation in the college. While many times we come up with complaints from some students that our faculty members speak Bengali in the class. Now, if they strictly follow speaking English in the class, the same boys will have problem with that too.


Question that is bugging me is how to solve this problem not only when students face external agencies but also in following the daily classes leading to that event.

Student Activities

Our recent foundation day celebrations triggers the thoughts here! To my pleasant surprise, I found an array of talents in the student community. On the other side, we have student unrests that start on very flimsy pretexts.What I started wondering was if we could keep students busy with these extra curricular activities year long, if that would not keep them out of harm's way!

Being away from Kolkata, the only real city in West Bengal and the nearest town Bisnupur being too insipid, there is very little to do beyond regular hours and during weekends. Faculty members run away during the week ends that too adds to the problem. Would lots of additional activities help with the problem! My guess is it would. In fact, I made that comment elsewhere and found some encouraging comments from the student community.

I remember my stint at IIT, Kanpur, that was a long distance away from the city proper. Thirty years back they had a large number of student activities and a full time dean was there to look after the student activities!

CS403: Advanced Computer Architecture- Results Prove the Point

Results of this course came out recently. The results prove the point I made a few posts back. My class managed to get only As and Bs, no Es or Os. Well. one interpretation of it certainly can be that I could not teach it well enough! But, the normal distribution of results of the course follows the trend well enough where the mean is around B grade. Students who have not even read OS until then, can never understand Advanced architecture well enough!

OS concepts, feel for what happens in programming are necessary skills, prerequisites for this course. I do not understand why this is not taught later in 3rd or 4th year of the curriculum! It makes much better sense there!

Books as we Know it

Will the printed books be around 10 years hence! 25 years or 50 years! Music became disembodied digital stream of bits a while back. Kindle started a revolution, turned books digital yet mimicked the format of a printed book.  So though the content has started becoming digital the whole experience was of reading a book. Along came iPad. Besides lot of other things it can do,  it  reads books in full color and with animated content. So who needs the books in the format we have been used to since the time of Gutenberg!

Electronic books, in full color, which you annotate too and that can talk to you, show video in full HD seems like an ideal medium for knowledge transmission. Kids growing up in digital environment will latch into these kind of things absolutely naturally. Like most things though the printed book also will run parallel though  at much less volumes than today. But then you never know. How quickly those records, cassettes vanished. very soon audio CDs also will go the same way. The only CDs available will have MP3 recordings on them. So, let's see how it goes.

Video is King!

Video is getting consumed everywhere. We are not talking about network programming. It is more of consumer contributed videos.Even network programming is depending more and more on user contributed videos. Think of all those funniest videos, disaster videos, crime cam shots and so on. But what really is a tidal wave is the YouTube movement. YouTube and similar sites are supplying content to more and more consumers.

I had a pet theory for sometime now. According to that theory viewing video would become like our picking a book from a library, we choose of course, and view that at our convenience. The social media based video viewing fits that model perfectly. Look at the iTunes like stores, once again it is the library model. Video rental is becoming streaming based or downloaded. Now comes news that more and more consumers want an Internet enabled TV. That will let them view these Internet based streaming media at one's own convenient time. This Nielsen report points the following trends in video viewing. I quote form the report announcement.

• Online Video: approximately 70% of global online consumers watch online video; but North Americans and Europeans lag in adoption. More than half of global online consumers watch online video in the workplace.
• Mobile Video: is already used by 11% of global online consumers: penetration is highest in Asia-Pacific and among consumers in their late 20s.
• Tablet PCs: are expanding the definition of mobile video. Globally, 11% of online consumers already own or plan to purchase a tablet PC (such as an iPad) in the next year.
• Television: is a universally important platform for video consumption, with connected consumers in many markets spending 4+ hours per day watching television.
• HDTV (High-Definition TV): is improving the TV viewing experience for as many as 30% of global online consumers. Adoption is highest among older consumers and in North America, where HD content has proliferated.
• 3DTV (Three-Dimensional TV): will have a small but important audience: 12% of global online consumers own or have definite intent to purchase a 3DTV in the next year.
• “Over the Top” TV: televisions with Internet connections are gaining interest. About one in five (22%) global online consumers owns or has definite interest in buying a television with Internet connection in the next year.

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!

ARM amazes Me!

A silicon processor that is not fabricated by the designer company is an amazement in itself. Thar the processor has been around for such a long time and has undergone improvements over time adds to that amazement. Though it could not make dent in the PC space, it is almost omnipresent in the mobile telephone handset segment. There are two interesting evolutions taking place as of now.

The first of these is that the personal computer may be undergoing an evolution in front of our eyes. The tablet form factor seems to be generating a lot of interest and there are a lot of devices on offer or about to come into market. The leader in this space is the iPad of course who seems to have sold more than a million devices, since its introduction a little more than a month ago. This form factor is likely to become the device of choice for people.Will the recent netbook form factor be as popular as it was at the launch of the products?

The other evolution that is happening is that tablets are getting designed by not Intel processors. The highly popular iPad is built around a processor, the A4, that has ARM at its core. There are tablets that use NVIDIA's Tegra processor that has two core ARM and graphics processors to take care of handling 1080p video. So, an interesting speculation is if ARM is going to take over the Tablet space!

While Atom from Intel powered the netbooks predominantly, the netbooks were designed to be mainly for net surfing rather than personal productivity. Thus the underpowered Atom was a good fit. But, now it is threatened with tablets. Tablets are designed to be able to personal productivity applications as well. That is a genuine threat to netbooks and Intel has already come out with a dual core Atom which can overcome the low horse power of the original Atom chip.

Let's wait and watch if ARM is going to take over the tablet space after conquering the mobile kingdom!

There's a New Species Evolving in PC Space Right Before our Eyes!

These evolutionary changes were happening for sometime now. The classic Wintel (Window + Intel) species have ruled the PC landscape for quite some time now. I am assuming the laptop to be a simple variant of the same PC model. Real change came with the introduction of the netbook. While the OS remained the Windows predominantly, there was a new processor, the Intel Atom. But it was still WinTel. It was sufficiently different variant of the PC. It was designed to be lower powered, meant for the surfing, mail and such Internet based applications in a very convenient, highly portable format.

Suddenly, there is a lot of activity in the Tablet format. Not that the species evolved just now. It has been around for some time.There were periodic attempts at  creating a tablet that will catch the fancy of users. The scene fairly exploded recently with the coming out of the iPad. Just today I read a report it has sold a million pieces in the 28 days it has been selling. There are many tablets in the works. Here are some examples. As with any evolutionary situation, some tablets are getting killed too! Microsoft seems to have killed its version for the tablet space. So did HP apparently, they killed the "slate" model they were readying for the market. Netbook sales seem to have flattened. So is tablet the next avatar of the personal computer. looks like hat. I personally think that's what's going to to happen. Let's see!

Microcontroller Market Starts to grow

Looks like the effects of the economic downturn is over as far as the micro-controller market is concerned. According to this report the market is slat3d to grow to $18.5 billion by 2015. It has already increased by 14% to $12.3 billion compared to 2009. That's encouraging. considering that the micros get into so many segments of the industry that indirectly shows the growth in other areas and corresponding growth in the demand for these devices.

Renesas holds the number 1 spot in terms of market share according to the same report. It is at 29% followed by Freescale at 10%. Other players in this market area include Infineon Technologies, Microchip Technology, and Fujitsu etc.

ASUS Tablets coming in June!!

There's a rush on to get tablets to the market by many companies around the globe. Now comes the announcement by netbook (a category of product that is threatened by the tablets) pioneers Asus that they are going to launch a tablet in Computes in June 2010.

This is going to be based on Tegra processor. That is a special processor again. It'd be a subject of another post soon! There are many a tablet products on the market already. It'd be interesting to see if tablets take away a chunk of the netbook category.

iPad vs. Netbooks

I have talked about how iPad seems to be a product that might make netbooks a redundant category. I came across a post that is completely effusive about why a iPad scores over a netbook. The author talks about not 7, not 10 but 15 reasons where iPad scores over a netbook. The authors lists hardware quality, functionality without hassles,

ready to go, high battery life, terrific user experience with the multi-touch screen, eReader, comics, excellent screen, lots od apps that are already available, speed, gaming, photo frame, portability, the fact that it is not a glorified iPod touch-bigger, and pure pleasure at using it. He quotes extensively from other reviewers. The device does seem to have caught fancy of users everywhere. Will it become the next wave in personal computing is something to be seen!

Read the eulogy to iPad here.

Technology for Education

If an educational institute has Wi-Fi then there are amazing things you can do to help students and be in touch with teachers, add value to the teaching, question forum, discussions; the possibilities are endless! I was kind of sensitized to these aspects by the reminder that came for call for papers for a t4e seminar run by IIT, Mumbai. In my one year, two semester stint so far in this institute i have been experimenting with some of these tools. it was limited by no Wi-Fi access. Students are not able to access the net very easily. But this certainly has possibility of improving teaching bu at least an order of quality.

iPAD Vs. Other eReaders

I have written on this before. There's iPad on one side which not only can read books but let you view video and play games, surf Internet etc. etc. The reader only eReaders as simply trying to duplicate the book reading experience for us. The eInk interface tries to emulate the printed words on a white page kind of feel for the reader. By itself these are nice devices. They not only emulate the book reading experience but also let you carry a slection of books with you and depending on what model it is; it'll let you buy books from a store too.That is an attractive concept by itself except that it has come about at this point in time.

What is happening with the mobile devices, Internet connectivity and laptop/ netbook kind of devices is that there is a push for convergence. People seem to pushing for a device that can give us phone connectivity, Internet connectivity, email and office productivity on the go and so on. It's great if we can have these in one device! These typically would be able to let you read books too. So what if that reading experience is slightly different from reading a paperback! What if the screen glows back at you, what about the convenience of touch screen! What about the convenience of all these functionality compared to just a replacement for current paperbacks!
 I am pretty sure the combine device would win. What exact form it'll take could be debatable but who would want to carry an additional eReader when the device you are carrying can let you read the book you want! You reading habits would need a little change, but that's been changing a lot recently anyway!

T4E Conference

Google's Buzz feature came on-line recently, then I received a call for paper from the technology for education 2010 international conference. It immediately struck me that the Google Buzz could be a huge help in actually teaching a class very conveniently. particularly in institutes of higher learning, technology & engineering and MBA schools. Most comm0n scenario is a campus wide Wi-Fi, students with laptops and with the Buzz, I can be in constant touch with my students. one could do this with facebook or twitter too. But this more general, besides announcements, I can direct them to specific slide shows at connected web sites, I can have a forum like situation where one student asking a question and the answer to that are visible to rest of the community. May be, I'll write a paper on that!

There are Servers and Servers

Servers have tended to become more and more powerful as does the desktops in an user organization. Thus, quite often, a powerful desktop can actually take the burden of managing a few clients. The essential requirement for fulfilling a server role is just that. A server should have enough capabilities to service the client needs. There is no need for looking for a box that is called a server! Yet lot of people will actually try to buy a box called server even though it is not called for at all.

I saw this first hand a while back. There was a set up required for managing just 5 clients. The need was for these clients and the server to run a library management set up. The clients were recently obtained desktops that had Core 2 Duo and 2 GB memory and so on.  While these desktops cost below Rs.40,000 but what was being proposed was a so called "server" costing at least 3 times more! Strange how people seem to go by names rather than by capability and functionality required!

Whatever happened to Toyota Legend!

Everyone dealing with the topic quality used to swear by Toyota. Toyota's production system was an absolute benchmark everyone will cite as a benchmark. It was a legend and it endured for a long time! However this is totally shaken now. There has been several recalls of different models of Toyota cars on quality issues. So what happened! Difficult to say. May be the company got complacent and all those watchful eyes monitoring the assembly lines slipped. May be there was conscious cutting of corners. In a nutshell they must have deviated from their legendary quality assurance processes.

Some reports of bad component quality surfaced but then the vendor of the final product is responsible for the overall quality and these sound like passing the blame. If true, it'd still mean processes failed in determining the incoming quality of these components/sub-systems. It would be interesting to find out what really happened! Let's watch and see.

Places have Vibes

I was at another educational institute couple of days back for a couple of nights. reached there one evening, spent the complete days and then came away the next morning. The hospitality was nice, my presentations went well; those are some factors that may have played the part. But then the hospitality bit was apparent only after the day has gone by completely and the organizers let us know that they'll pick up the tab on the hotel bill. Presentations happened in the evening and until then I could not have felt good because of this factor. However, I felt good about the seminar right from the morning. Ditto about the institute, the way everyone was friendly and smiling and so on.

There is something always that you cannot define, nor analyze rationally that quite often gives you positive and negative feelings about a place, even before you have enough data to analyze things objectively. That's what must be this thing, commonly known as the "vibes"!

Confusion over the roles!

I have seen this happening several times before during my long career. in many organizations the administration and/or accounts departments have this wrong notion that they hold power over the main service providers. For example in a software development organization the administration would try and make the software developers run around for small little things. The software engineers needing a writing pad may have to go back and forth to the minion holding charge of the stock of pads. As this person feels power in controlling and giving away this pad he would exercise his authority by turning away the seeker of the pad couple of times. He will say how this time was inconvenient for him and the requester must come back at a more opportune time.

Unfortunately many a times the overall manager also does not understand what should really happen and encourage this bureaucracy. The basis is simple, the administration and/or accountancy departments exist for facilitating the work of the service providers, the real generators of revenue for the organization. These support functions are then service providers to the business generators/fulfillment people!

Saw this example come up once again! In this educational institute there is a system of signing the salary register by all the employees.So the faculty and other employees must go over and find the convenient time for the particular clerk or the accountant and get hold of the register and sign it. Problem is quite often some slots are signed many a times. So, suddenly there was this office order that they must be signed or else! The "or else" was that the current salary would be stopped. Then the affected person will have do a "prayer" to get the salary. A prayer for his legitimate dues!

Simple issue is what are we trying to save with the process! The time of a clerk or an accountant or the confidentiality of the financial data of who gets what! Looked like that was not an issue.Then why could not the register be circulated to the people for signing! Saving everybody's time, in fact! By making multiple other people come round multiple times there is a lot of wasted time and chaos in the support division anyway!

AVG and AVAST

Both of these are free anti-virus software products. Both claim to be in use by hundreds of millions of users. They are based on the model where you give customers a foretaste of good products and then try to up-sell into more sophisticated products. Both are obviously good products and have been around for some time now. I personally think that's a good model too. After people get used to the anti virus protection, they can then take a decision about additional protection. Using these known good sources is a vastly superior strategy compared to getting into the clutches of the fake anti-virus products that some people are making a lot of money from. According to some estimates these rogues made more than 150 million dollars from selling such products last year alone.

One small silver lining for such scary stats is that a lot of people do want to install anti-virus products. But what really matters is that you get it from a known good source, unless you have been deceived into buying such stuff and contributing to their kitty. Here are two good choices for your protection.

Patent Championships 2009

Last year IBM won the most number of patents. That is a championship the big Blue has won for the 17th time in a row! IBM has this image of being a very conservative company. That has changed a lot in the recent past. It has gone through couple of transformations. While it was previously synonymous with big iron, it earns a large part of its revenues through software services now! So, looks can be really misleading. Somehow the innovations must run pretty well if they have to manage this for 17 years consecutively! I am sure IBM is still not as casual as a Google or one of the start ups. Yet, this is running the innovation machine so well. There are a couple of really interesting things about the roll of honors. The second in line, Samsung managed to get significantly less number of patents. IBM received 4914 patents while Samsung received 3611 patents.

The other interesting aspect of the list is that out of the top 10 spots, IBM, Microsoft, Intel and HP are the only American companies. The others are from outside the US: the likes of Samsung, Canon, Panasonic Toshiba, Sony and Seiko Epson. A couple of trends become obvious. Things are going global without a doubt! And companies think that patents are an important tool in the global playing field.

Recently active malware

Sunbelt Software found the following malware pieces to be the most active last month. It is good to be aware of the threats that are current. Maybe you can ensure that your malware protection does have detection and correction capability of these threats:
1.Trojan.Win32.Generic!BT
2.Trojan-Spy.Win32.Zbot.gen
3.Trojan.Win32.Generic!SB.0
4.Exploit.PDF-JS.Gen (v)            
5.Trojan.ASF.Wimad (v)             
6.Fast Browser Search              
7.Trojan.Win32.Malware              
8.INF.Autorun (v)                  
9.BehavesLike.Win32.Malware (v)     
10.Trojan.Malware               

Medical Technology

This morning my wife went through a knee surgery. This is a corrective procedure so that the knee joint replacement (as suggested by most doctors we consulted) was not necessary for some more time. But this post is not about that, though the knee joint prosthesis certainly rates as one of the wonders! There were couple of pictures about surgery in olden days hanging at the entrance to the OT complex.

One was of a woman who was totally conscious and yet a surgeon had started the removal procedure of one of her breasts. There was one assistant holding her hands and patients had to endure such a process. The other was that of a man hanging from some contraption, one person hanging on to one shoulder and the other was straining at the other shoulder trying to correct a dislocated shoulder! I was struck by how far we have come! I am sure many must have died simply from the shock/trauma of the surgery itself!

But today knee replacement is possible and works well for at least twenty years! I am not even looking at heart/liver/kidney transplant like really sophisticated procedures. The surgery itself is not that much of a trauma anymore. There are a whole host of things to manage the post surgical pain and recovery. After you have recovered, it feels so good! Most often at least! With this corrective procedure my wife should be able to start walking reasonably comfortably again and that should last 5 to 10 years! I remember with my own surgery, the ankle fracture was completely healed. Three years later when the hardware were removed, there was not one spot on the pieces of metal that remained inside my body for three years!

But all this happened step by step, one baby step at a time! These advances on so many areas have brought us this overall advancement! I kept wondering how many experiments, how many researchers toiling away at it and technological advances made all these advances possible!

You cannot help wondering how small improvements at the boundary areas of any discipline keeps moving the boundary in small increments! Yet over a time you have a larger area representing the body of knowledge!