Weekly Reading Digest: 25-08-11

Needless to say, the proliferation of information on the internet has bogged down even the fastest of readers (and I am far from being one). So, I often find myself staring at 25-30 browser tabs open at any given time and crying for that most precious commodity of all: attention. Add to it the endless social networking streams on facebook, twitter and now Google Plus (ok the Google Plus stream is still admittedly a trickle in comparison to the other two).

Many a times, I come across good articles that are worth sharing or pondering upon, but the most I can manage is post a link on a social networking stream (twitter more often than facebook) and it gets lost forever. Friends advise that I can search for these links if I use the proper hashtags and all but I don’t see myself ever finding the time or inclination to do that. In that sense, the proverb “You can’t step on the same stream twice” holds in the case of facebook and twitter streams.

In addition, the temptation of microblogging on twitter has reduced the discipline and willpower required to write more than 140 characters of text, significantly reducing blogging frequency. So, to get around this and to keep a regular stream of blogs, I have decided to maintain a weekly reading digest to share and keep a track of things I find interesting during the week.

This, I hope, will serve three primary purposes. First, I can remain a regular blogger and not find myself in a situation where I have so much on my mind to blog about that I don’t blog at all. Second, I can keep track of interesting articles/blogs/news items/op-eds that I come across and perhaps come back to blog in more detail on some of these at a later date. Third, I would not have an unsustainable number of open links in my browser for more than a week.

So, here I begin with putting up whatever is currently open in my browser (though some of the articles might be weeks or months old) and resolve to make the weekly reading digest a regular habit!

• Gigwalk, an interesting venture that enables mobile crowdsourcing
• The Economist writes on turning Asimov’s cosmic power stations into reality
• Political powerful wives, daughters and now sisters of prominent political leaders
• Andrew Mcafee on whether Gen-Y workers would change workplaces or vice versa
• The Economist on the stickiness of long-term unemployment
• The NewYorker on Sheryl Sandberg’s impact on male-dominated Silicon Valley culture
• An article that strikes a chord with experiencing Europe on Eurail
• The New York Times on research related to Decision Fatigue
• Marc Andreessen on why software is eating the world

Patents of Mass Destruction?

Apple, briefly the most valuable company by market capitalization a few weeks ago, has seen a remarkable recovery from being almost bankrupt less than 15 years ago. Its iPods and iTunes truly revolutionized the music industry and now the iPhones and the iPads are doing the same to the mobile phones and computing industries.

The changes in these industries have been so dramatic that erstwhile giants Nokia and Microsoft have been found struggling to keep pace. Other companies such as HTC, Samsung and Motorola, all powered by the Google-driven Android OS, are the new competitors for Apple. The rapid rise of the Apple first attracted Nokia to file a patent infringement case on Apple for violations by iPhone of 10 patents related to wireless data, speech coding, security and encryption. Given that Nokia has been one of the pioneers in mobile telephony and Apple only began creating mobile phones in 2007, Apple’s need to use GSM and IEEE 802.11 standards seems inevitable and hence the need for Apple to pay royalty for Nokia’s IPR essential under these standards. The only question would be if Nokia was willing to provide Apple with Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) terms and conditions for licensing these patents. Since over 40 mobile-phone manufacturers have licensed these patents, according to Nokia, it’s intriguing why Apple would not be offered similar FRAND terms and conditions. So, prima facie, Apple appears to be culpable of violating Nokia’s IPR.

Curiously, while presenting its response to the above lawsuit, Apple actually counter-sued Nokia of infringing on 13 of its patents related to real-time signal processing, list scrolling and document translation, scaling and rotation of touch-screen display, among others. While some of the patents date back to the 1990s and claim that the usage of the USB port itself is a violation, others have strangely patented ideas like “Conserving Power by Reducing Voltage supplied to an Instruction-processing Portion of the Prorcessor” instead of particular methods to achieve this! I wonder what the non-instruction-processing portions of the Processor are and whether this patent denies any energy-saving method that employs voltage reduction to such instruction-processing portions. If that is so, it sounds like a patent wrongly granted because the concept of energy-saving by Voltage reduction should have been around for decades and is certainly not invented by Apple.

Subsequently, the Delaware court, where the two lawsuits were filed, has put both the lawsuits on hold pending decisions by the US International Trade Commission (ITC) on the matter. Apple also tried to take a further aggressive stance against Nokia by bringing the patent battle to UK courts by alleging violation of 9 patents (wonder where the residual four violations disappeared!) and it seems more of an arm-twisting tactic in the negotiations with Nokia, rather than any genuine violation of Apple’s IPR.

In the meantime, Apple sued HTC for infringement of iPhone patents which is bound to ultimately drag in software licensors Google and Microsoft, particularly if HTC has an indemnity clause related to litigation on the licensed technology. A quick glance at the court filings in this case reveal some of the patents alleged to have been infringed by Nokia, in addition to frivolous things such as “Unlocking a device by performing gestures on an unlock image” and “Automated response to and sensing of user activity in Portable Devices”. I wonder whether while granting such patents, the US Patent Office even stopped to consider that any touch-screen device would require the user to perform a gesture on an unlock image or make automated responses on sensing user activity and these cannot be considered an “innovation” whatsoever!

HTC counter-sued Apple alleging violation of general hardware and software used to implement directories in mobile phones and power management in mobile devices. Given that at least one of these patents was only granted a day before the filing of this complaint, it’s clear that the Patent Offices are granting patents without adequate checks to ensure that the technology is not already in use (which would render it non-patentable). This looks like a rather weak attempt by HTC to gain some bargaining power against Apple.

Microsoft, in order to defend its Windows Phone 7 OS and attack the freely available Android OS, filed a patent infringement lawsuit against device-manufacturer Motorola claiming 9 patent violations related to syncing e-mails, contacts and calendar entries and notifying applications about changes in signal strength and battery power. Here too, if there’s an indemnity clause on licensed technology between Google and Motorola, the former will have to be included as a defendant like the Apple vs HTC case. Also, the Patent Office again appears culpable of awarding patents that are too general (the implementation of the idea and not the idea itself should be patented; syncing e-mails, for example, is a concept/idea and should be allowed to be implemented in a non-patented manner).

Within a week, Motorola sued Apple for violating 18 patents related to wireless communication technologies, wireless e-mail, proximity sensing, location-based services and multi-device synchronization. Some of these might be similar to the patent violations claimed by Nokia under the WCDMA and 802.11 industry standards, which will invite F/RAND terms and conditions for licensing. Others seem to have been idea-driven rather than ways of implementing an idea, which is another instance of the short-coming in the patent-granting process itself! Apple sued Motorola on violations of its multi-touch patents and more recently on violations related to its Motorola Xoom tablet, which Motorola has dismissed to be without merit.

More recently, Apple sued Samsung on the design of the Samsung Galaxy Tab and smartphones which is more of a design infringement rather than patent violation. This lawsuit invokes the principles of Community Design and Apple even won injunctions in the European Union and Australian courts on the matter, forcing Samsung to go for Apple-approved Tablets in Australia. However, even this particular duel had its counter-suit by Samsung on Apple wherein Samsung claimed Apple violations of HSPA and WCDMA telecom technology patents and technology for tethering a mobile phone to a PC.  Though these violations, if proven, appear more serious than the claims of design infringements, Samsung is clearly on the backfoot after losing the EU and Australian cases. However, given the symbiotic relation between Apple and Samsung, as uncovered by the Economist, and the extent to which an iPhone’s components come from Samsung, it seems strange that Apple has actually gone ahead with suing Samsung on this matter, given its dependence on Samsung is higher than Samsung’s dependence on Apple.

The progress of patent wars seems to have engulfed the entire PC/mobile industry as technology giants try to build their patent arsenal, predominantly as a deterrent against patent attacks by other firms. As one of the recent articles on NPR shows, patent trolls are stifling innovation across the software industry and seems to be a big drain on shareholder money spent towards litigation and building the patent arsenals. It’s high time the patent offices around the world take notice and stop issuing frivolous patents and also seriously limit the duration for software patents to 3-5 years instead of 25 years because of the much faster speed of changes and technological progress in this particular industry.

GDP in 1AD?

Note: This post was though of long ago but given my inexcusable and abominable laziness towards reviving my blog, got dragged on for over 10 months. In fact, it was very much a bottleneck for future blog posts because of half-hearted attempts to complete it before writing about something else. Just deleting it was perhaps an option but as they say, better late than never. Now that this one is out of the way, there’s perhaps some hope of being a regular blogger again.

The Economist carried this intriguing chart giving the share of world GDP calculated since 1AD.

My first reaction was: “1AD?! Ridiculous! Here the Indian Central Statistics Organisation (CSO) finds it difficult to get a demand-side GDP consistent with the supply-side one and people are fantasizing about knowing what GDP was in 1AD!”

I made this remark to one of my colleagues at Axis, Nithya, with whom I regularly used to (I have since moved to Delhi and out of Axis!) discuss things on topics related to finance, economics and markets. (The guy has solid fundamentals in finance and economics but just refuses to appreciate that marketing is worth anything at all! (a stance that I, needless to say, strongly oppose)) .  His reaction was “How can you disbelieve something in The Economist?!”  His argument being that if I don’t believe something from The Economist, I shouldn’t believe anything else that The Economist says either. That to me is a bit unreasonable because I suppose opinions should be based on issues and not merely on source.

Well, coming back to the GDP in 1AD, there are several reasons that I presented that make it a dubious number in my opinion, including the changes in political boundaries, no records of generally accepted exchange rates to measure output and no reliable records of extent of productive activity. However, given that someone like Angus Maddison, who recently passed away, spent years researching on these numbers, it is rather unfair to dismiss them off-hand as unreliable.

I downloaded an excel sheet from the Angus Maddison webpage, which showed the statistics in some details. Well, I did get answers to some of the doubts I had. For example, a lot of these regions are grouped together till about a couple of centuries back to take care of changes in political boundaries. Secondly, the numbers have been calculated on the basis of 1990 Geary-Khamis dollars as a constant measure of value. However, I am unsure to what extent we can measure inflation over the years across countries and adjust accordingly.

Of course, there may be a lot of records from different times and regions to make an educated guess but I feel that there will be too many assumptions involved and the result could be an order of magnitude away from reality. Moreover, the utility of such an exercise will be seriously limited by a lack of reliability. Plus, the attached file just has projections (retrospective projections, perhaps) for year 1AD, 1000 AD, 1500 AD and so on, before going on a year-by-year account since the 1800s. The intervening periods are totally missing and the gaps are likely filled with several mathematical assumptions, but these are largely obscure. Needless to say, projecting too much into the future (or into the past) will only throw up a fanciful number which appears far more objective than it really is.

As the Economist article states, even Maddison admitted that figures prior to 1820 were based more on “clues and conjectures” and so the conclusions that Asia accounted for more than half of the GDP before 1820 and that Africa before 1820 always survived at subsistence levels, though perhaps true, can hardly be said to be “substantiated” by the Maddison numbers. This is equivalent to projecting numbers based on certain assumptions and then using those numbers  to prove these very assumptions. Maddison’s logic that “numbers are more readily contestable and likely to be contested” holds true only when there are reliable resources available to find contesting evidence in the first place!

So, though Maddison’s efforts towards establishing a number for GDP in 1AD might have been sincere, they have hardly added to the real GDP growth during his time!

Jobless Claims in U.S. Decreased 27,000 to 451,000 Last Week… Or did they?

The news came in today  that jobless claims last week were 451k instead of the forecast range of 460k to 482k.

Wow! Great! Says the market. And the Dow Jones takes a leap. But did it look before it leapt?

The same report further said:

“For the latest reporting week, nine states didn’t file claims data to the Labor Department in Washington because of the federal holiday earlier this week, a Labor Department official told reporters. As a result, California and Virginia estimated their figures and the U.S. government estimated the other seven, the official said.”

Doesn’t that sound like projecting a forecasted number as actual?! A big state like California could well have been forecasted way off from the actual number! Add to that, this other bit of information from the same report and the decrease seems more unrealistic:

“Companies added 67,000 workers to their payrolls in August, the Labor Department said last week. Overall employment dropped by 54,000 for a second month, as the government let go census workers.”

Probably it’s best to stay “put” over the long weekend! 😛

Cloud Computing

ong time no post, yet again!

Lots of bloggable things happening but unfortunately, there seems to be less and less time (given that 3 1/2 hrs of my life have been spent in daily traveling for the last 13 months!)

Cloud Computing has been on my mind for quite some time now and I think it’s a good return to the blog to just post a few links on the subject (from The Economist) here:

Computing: Battle of the Clouds

Cloudy with a chance of rain

Dropbox: There’s room yet in the cloud

Work in the Digital Age: A Clouded Future

I have begun using the Dropbox and it’s quite good. Very convenient to share files across work locations without having to e-mail stuff.

Manchester City fan troubled by players’ Team Bridge gesture

Manchester, England – John Wilson, 49, a resident of Manchester City and an ardent fan of the Manchester City FC was deeply shocked after witnessing the gesture of three City players wearing the “Team Bridge” t-shirt at the Premier League clash against Portsmouth at the City of Manchester Stadium.

Three City players, Carlos Tevez, Nigel de Jong and Stephen Ireland, had decided to wear the t-shirt in solidarity with their team-mate Wayne Bridge, following recent revelations concerning his personal life.

However, Wilson perceived the gesture as a signal from these players that they might be moving to Stamford Bridge during the concluding week of the transfer window.

“It was absolutely disturbing”, Wilson said, still shuddering from the thought. “Just when you have started seeing the club showing hopes of a European place, you cannot expect the fans to shrug off at this gesture.”

The post-match comments of City Manager Roberto Mancini also seemed to validate Wilson’s concern. Mancini had added after the match, “I am really happy with the decision. Tevez, Ireland and de Jong have always been so close to Bridge”.

“I was really worried for John after he returned from the match on Sunday”, said Mrs. Wilson. “I even checked the scores to see that his team had won the match. So the sulkiness in his behavior was rather unexplainable. He simply refused to speak.”

It was only after Mr. Wilson read the morning news that he realized that the entire “Team Bridge” display was in support of another City player Wayne Bridge. Mrs. Wilson recounts Mr. Wilson shrieking “Jesus Christ!” at the breakfast table that caused her to jump. But she expressed satisfaction that at least her husband was more cheerful now.

“I have always considered Wayne Bridge as a Chelsea man and don’t like him in the City side. He seems like some spy to me”, said Mr. Wilson. “Tevez and the club must be more considerate of their fans’ feelings before attempting to throw rude surprises such as these, especially during the transfer period. I am already concerned those United jerks are trying to win him back from us”, he added.

Onion falls amid concerns of Ban-Frustcy

Chennai, India – The Onion (NYSE: THEO) was trading at 10% lower this week than the corresponding week last year after news that leading market research firm Frust & Sillyone banned its employees from accessing The Onion from office.

Over the last year, The Onion has impressively garnered a substantial pie in the online entertainment industry. The industry saw explosive growth in the wake of the global economic meltdown, which left millions of people at office with nothing to work on.

People across offices had jumped onto The Onion bandwagon in order to escape the abysmal boredom and uselessness created by the recessionary gloom. “It was a wonderful way to keep oneself informed about things happening around the world. Given the work levels (or lack thereof) at office, browsing The Onion was the most productive use of one’s time”, says Casey Baring, Consultant in the ICT practice at Frust & Sillyone.

“Also, considering the superior humor content of The Onion, it was naturally elevated to divine levels by its audience, vindicating NYSE’s choice of the Greek word for God as the company’s ticker symbol”, she adds.

The fall in Onion prices has also created a downward pressure on the prices of other related items such as potatoes and vegetables, resulting in the WPI inflation (for primary articles) easing to 14.56% this week compared to 14.66% last week. The government had earlier classified the writings on The Onion under the “primary articles” category, apparently given their potential to avert a global depression.

Earlier last month, The Onion had seen a sharp surge of 15% as a part of the relief rally after talks about a possible acquisition of new entrant Kuttappan, Inc. fell through. “The deal would have destroyed value at The Onion. Although Kuttappan had made a promising entry in the online entertainment industry, the sense of humor at Kuttappan, Inc. was clearly on the decline. It would have been too big a risk to take”, Ms. Baring added.

The Onion’s inability to reach out to its target audience is seen as a strategic handicap for the company which might result in long term prices hovering around the current low levels. Even other companies in the financial hub Mumbai are expected to follow Frust & Sillyone in pushing The Onion towards Ban-Frustcy.

Adds Sabn Ismail from Exist Bank, Mumbai, “Though The Onion has not faced the axe yet, several other avenues of employee entertainment such as Phasebook and FML have already been banned. The gloom across the entire workplace is palpable. You can feel it in the air you breathe when you enter the office.  People are going through an Existential crisis.”

“The entire market has been literally wiped out overnight”, says Eddy Nair from Frust & Sillyone, Chennai. “The government must step in to prevent the nascent growth from the gloomy clouds of depression. The Onion, being on the primary articles list, is too big to fail. Its downfall could permanently damage the population’s outlook towards life in general.”

However, The Onion’s loss could be a blessing in disguise for smaller competitors such as Kuttappan, Inc. “This time is apt for Kuttappan, Inc. to brace itself (read tie the lungi at half-mast) for the task-at-hand and bring forth some stimulating ROTFL pieces,” adds Nair, with a smug.

End of the Noughties…

And it’s that time of the year again! Ah, not only the year… actually it’s that time of the decade!! I came across “The decade in News Photographs” that the Boston Globe tries to capture via photographs.

Having dealt with all kinds of charts and power point slides last week at work, it was only natural that I would come up with a pie chart that captures the major groups of events that have caught media attention over the last decade.  It is not very surprising to see that terror attacks and the response to them (the war against terror) have a whopping 32% share in the images whereas natural calamities capture another 20%. Also, the war on terror seems to have gone overboard in dealing with the root problem of terrorism.

Conspicuous omissions from the list of pictures are the rise of Apple iPods; social networking sites such as Facebook, Orkut and Twitter; the SARS and H1N1 epidemics; the North Korean Nuclear program; the environmental debate; the rise of the Euro and the EU and the Russian war in Georgia.

All in all, an eventful decade, though not a very positive one for humanity in general. Hope the future tens(e) see the tensions cooling and the economy recovering! 🙂

On Devanagari vs Roman script

Here comes another post on linguistics! The context here is another argument on the “superiority” (in terms of ease of learning for a new learner) of the Devanagari vs the Roman script.

Before we get into deciding on the script/language phonetic issues, we need to get a few definitions clear. So here we go:

Language: System for encoding and decoding information. Could be in written or speech form.

Script or writing system: The set of basic elements or symbols used to express one or more languages in textual form.

The mapping between the two is called as orthography (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthography) and is language-specific (as long as only one script is used for that language).

The phoneme and the grapheme are the smallest segmental units in the spoken and written forms of a language. When the writtten units or graphemes correspond to the spoken sounds of the language or phonemes, the orthography is referred to as phonemic orthography. Several Eastern European languages as well as Indian languages have a good grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence. However, the Roman or Latin script which is primarily shared by the Germanic and Romance languages has little correspondence between graphemes and phonemes.

The Roman script has an alphabetic writing system (each grapheme is either a consonant or vowel) whereas the Devanagari script is an abugida writing system (each grapheme is based on a consonant or a zero consonant letter but the vowel notation is obligatory).  The advantage of the fomer system is having a limited number of graphemes to learn which keeps the writing system simple. However, the downside being that the lesser degree of correspondence between graphemes and phonemes may introduce a certain degree of ambiguity in understanding the transition from written to spoken form of the language (and vice versa).

Since both writing systems (and there are more as well) have evolved naturally in the case of natural languages, there is no reason to believe that one writing system is necessary superior to another in terms of ease of learning for a new learner. Of course, if a person is exposed to only one form of writing system throughout his or her childhood, it will be difficult to understand and make sense of another type of writing system because of the predisposition of the brain to attach a correspondence between graphemes and phonemes in one way only. In fact, it seems likely that people exposed to the alphabetic writing system will find it easier to grasp the one-to-one correspondence in abugida writing systems, though they may require more time to internalize the significantly larger set of graphemes.

Recession-proof graduate

I just came about this e-book by Charlie Hoehn. I did find the idea of free work after college very powerful.

For one, I am happy that the recession has at least ensured that some of the brightest minds out of college just don’t go chasing after mundane high-paying finance jobs. Though most of them will be disappointed at not meeting their monetary expectations after grad school, it is a brilliant opportunity to escape the straitjacketed career progression after graudation and chart a unique career path for oneself.

The advice from Hoehn is a good way to set one’s thought process into motion in this direction.