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.