Chronosynclastic Infundibulum

If the row between Sreesanth and Harbhajan is any indication, the Indian cricket team may end up paying a heavy price for IPL. IPL seems to threaten Indian team’s cohesion. Apparently, after the match between Mumbai Indians and Kings XI Punjab, Sreesanth who was on the winning side walked up to Harbhajan Singh — the captain of Mumbai Indians — shook his hands, and said, “Hard luck”. Seems like that was enough to provoke Harbhajan into hitting Sreesanth under the eye. If the bad blood continues, it doesn’t take a whole lot to figure that having both of them on the Indian team may actually do more harm than good. Worse, what if we see such spats among other players as well?

One could argue that Harbhajan Singh has had a bad history to begin with, and is hardly an exemplary sportsperson. Also, Sreesanth’s antics on the field are soon becoming folk tales. But that doesn’t change the fact that we are going to have people like them in our cricket team. So how is the Indian cricket team going to fare under IPL constant barrage of situational conflicts?

Another argument is that IPL, the format, and the dynamics of teams is still nascent with IPL. Once it matures, these issues will disappear. But I am not convinced. Assuming that IPL does mature, and that IPL does discover new talent for our national cricket team, will an all-star Indian cricket team win more matched? Deccan Chargers have demonstrated that it is not always the case. A lot more goes into a successful team than an all-star roster. The key is teamwork and confidence, and that’s exactly what IPL is eroding away from the national team. And this, is not a wild leap of logic, its based on the empirical observation with the US basketball dream team. Its an all-star team with the best players on paper, but still cant seem to win championships for over 5 years now. Is this going to be the chronic trend of the Indian cricket team?

Net Neutrality has been an ongoing debate for quite a few years now. In its simplest terms, net neutrality is a principle that states that all traffic on the internet must be treated the same way; that there should be no preferential treatment to a specific kind or class of traffic. The are many camps for and against net neutrality. Each group fervently advocates its position on the issue, while slinging mud on the other camp. This debate has polarized large sections of stakeholders on the internet. Unfortunately, most of the polarization is based more on propaganda and prejudice than facts. Investigating the net neutrality issue reveals that the waters are indeed quite muddy.

The groups supporting net neutrality — like SaveTheInternet.com Coalition — argue that net neutrality is fundamental to the success of the internet. Net Neutrality prevents ISPs from speeding up or slowing down Web content based on its source, ownership or destination. If ISPs are allowed to slow certain web content down and speed others up, based of Service Level Agreements (SLA) with content providers (like Reuters, Fox News, Yahoo, Google, Facebook etc.), then this will result in all big corporations signing SLAs with all ISPs, and individual content providers like bloggers will be left out in the cold, and there is little that can be done against such discrimination. In essence, the advocates argue that net neutrality an extension of free speech, and is necessary to protect free speech on the internet. Other implications of not having net neutrality include ISPs allowing (say) Google’s pages to load faster than (say) Yahoo’s (because Google signed an SLA with the ISP), thus denying its users efficient access to their trusted source of information.

The groups opposing net neutrality — like Hands Off The Internet Coalition — argue that heavy regulation of the internet runs against free market economics, and that such restrictions slow down the rate of innovation on the internet. They argue that different kinds of internet traffic have different requirements. For instance, live chat requires less bandwidth, but the traffic cannot be delayed, on the other hand streaming video requires high bandwidth, but can afford some delay because the video is buffered at the viewing computer, downloads can withstand occasional delays and low bandwidth. It makes sense treat each of these traffic streams differently in order to provide a better user experience, but net neutrality prohibits this.

Lets see how the arguments for and against net neutrality really stand up to criticism.

Now, if net neutrality was implemented as a strict regulation, this can give rise to a lot problems. For instance, how do network providers treat spam under net neutrality? Currently, network providers can block spam at the entry point into their network. If the networks are expected to treat all traffic equally, then they have to treat spam the same as other traffic. Which implies that they are having to bear the cost of routing spam on their networks with no income from it. Guess who they will pass that cost on to: the consumers. So is net neutrality really what the consumers want?

If customers subscribed to a pay-per-view service over the internet, then customers have every right to be guaranteed a satisfactory viewing experience. However, the network provider cannot do that under net neutrality because the provider is not allowed to allocate bandwidth for the pay-per-view service. So is net neutrality really helping?

On the other hand, if net neutrality wasn’t implemented then this would allow network providers to treat different kinds of traffic differently, thus providing a better user experience. But if that were truly an issue then how do different classes of network traffic work well today without so-called ‘tiered’ services for different classes of traffic. Answer: there is more bandwidth in the network core than the traffic consumes. As long as there is good admission control on the edge of the Internet, it doesn’t seem like you need such ‘tiered’ services. Wouldn’t that make the ‘tiered’ services argument too weak?

Consider the competition between VoIP services and traditional phone lines. Typically all your phone providers are also ISPs. And VoIP is very sensitive to delay in the traffic, more so than web browsing, streaming video, or downloads. So if the ISPs wanted to discourage their customer from using VoIP services, then they could do that by simply delaying packets for a few seconds randomly. For web browsing and other services, it would only show up as a few seconds delay in a page loading, or a delay in the video starting, which is easily tolerable. But with VoIP, this would show up as a jitter in a voice call. This would make VoIP unusable. Don’t we need regulations to protect the customers from such practices? Isn’t net neutrality a way out of this?

So net neutrality, while addressing some issues, opens up other problems which the Internet community will have to deal with. Worse, while it is easy to make a regulation like net neutrality, it is very difficult to enforce it. How do you detect a violation of net neutrality? If ‘bad’ ISPs are smart enough, then they can hoodwink any mechanism to detect such violations. It can range from delaying all traffic for a few seconds so that only VoIP services are affected, to dropping only certain kinds of traffic during periods of traffic congestion. The above two techniques is indistinguishable from situations where a `good’ ISP is having traffic management problems and so is forced to delay traffic, or is forced to drop traffic during congestion. So how do you distinguish ‘bad’ ISPs from ‘good’ one and penalize only the ‘bad’ ones? Its not always possible.

So, if net neutrality is more a regulation in theory, than something which can be enforced successfully, and people do realize it, then why do we have groups advocating for it so strongly? What could be gained from it, other than a rhetorical stand on the ideals that they strive for? The answer might surprise you.

Ironically, the arguments being made on both sides of net neutrality fails to address the real issue. In fact, it serves to hide the real issue of why net neutrality has become such a focal point of conflict on the internet today. To understand this better, lets see who are the corporate entities involved in the net neutrality debate. The supporters of net neutrality include the likes of Google, Yahoo, eBay and AeA. The opposers of net neutrality include the likes of 3M, Cisco Systems, Qualcomm, Verizon, AT&T, and Time Warner. Note that there is a clear division of the functional roles of each camp. The camp which supports net neutrality are all content providers where as the camp which opposes net neutrality are all network infrastructure providers.

Why do content providers like net neutrality? Because it allows the content providers to innovate and come up with new applications and solutions without having to worry about how these application will be treated by the network. Why do network infrastructure providers oppose net neutrality? Because this will aloow for innovation and diversity in network infrastructure to accommodate new applications and solution which can evolve from the Internet. What does this mean? This means that net neutrality is no longer about free speech, or democracy, or free market, or any ideals. Its all about who gets to control the internet and the innovation in it. Net neutrality, under the hood, is an ongoing battle between content providers and infrastructure providers over who controls the web and the innovation in it.

I had the following problem(s):

• I had a fairly large presentation which I had to share among several people for review.
• Not everyone was running the same version of Powerpoint, and not everyone used Windows.
• People who wouldn’t be able to make it to my actual presentation wanted to be able to view it (along with the voice narration) later.
• I wanted it to be accessible and usable by everyone regardless of the OS, the browser, or the presentation software they were using.

I figured this was a pretty common problem that many people face and a documented solution would be nice. More so, since someone I demonstrated this solution to now swears by it and can’t thank me enough. So I figured, why not spread the knowledge (Unfortunately, this solution works only if you are using Windows XP/Vista. Sorry, I couldn’t find the right tools to make it work on MAC OS X.)

Here’s the bird’s eye view of my solution:

1. Prep your presentation to be made ‘complete’ and ‘kiosk-ready’.
2. Download and install AuthorPoint Lite.
3. Import the presentation into AuthorPoint Lite, and preserve the rehearse timings, animations, and (optionally) narration.
4. Convert the presentation to flash using AuthorPoint Lite.
5. Upload the generated swf file online for the world to see!
6. The End.

Prepping your presentation

Before you can make a presentation portable, you have got to make sure that the presentation itself has enough information in it to be portable. Also, you have to ensure that the presentation have been configured so that the tools you will use to make it portable can use it to advantage.

So here’s how you would go about the job:

Ensure all information is available

When are making a presentation portable, then, more often than not, the people who will access it will not have the luxury of you walking through the presentation for them. So make sure you have notes for each slide for the presentation to be understandable on its own, even without the speaker present. It often a good idea to include the text of your narration for each slide in the Slide Notes section.

Recording Narration

You also have the choice of recording your narration. You can do this if you would like people to be able to view and hear your presentation online. In order to record your presentation (Assuming you have a workgin microphone to record) you need to do the following:

• Ensure that you have no automatic animations set. You can do that as follows:
  1. Click on the Slide Show menu and choose Custom Animation.
  2. Click on the first item in the Animation Order box on the Order & Timing tab.
  3. Select the On Mouse Click radio button under Start Animation as shown in the figure below.
• Test your microphone by opening Slide Show -> Record Narration -> Set Microphone Level button. You’ll see the Microphone Check dialog box pop up. Set the level appropriately as shown below:
• You can adjust the sound quality if you like:
  
• DO NOT check the ‘Link the Narrations’ checkbox! This option being unchecked is very important for portability!
• Now start recording you narration and manually click through the slides (and animation) as you narrate into the microphone. You can stop anytime by pressing [Esc]. After you reach the last slide, or after you press [Esc], PowerPoint will ask if you’d like to save the slide timings. Click No. (As shown below):
  
• Now you can browse through the slides and review your narration by clicking on the icon. You can delete the narration on each slide and record the narration if necessary.

Rehearsing Timing

Click on the Slide Show menu and choose Rehearse Timings. You’ll immediately be transferred into Slideshow View, and the narration should begin. You’ll see a Rehearsal toolbar appear:

Advance through the presentation by advancing to the next slide when the narration for each slide is complete. Also make sure that you step through the animation appropriately. When you’ve scrolled through the entire presentation, PowerPoint will again ask if you’d like to save the timings. Click Yes.

Now your presentation is self-contained and complete. However, it is still a .ppt file. To make it portable, you need to convert it to a more portable format. My choice is ShockWave File, or Flash format.

AuthorPoint Lite

AuthorPoint Lite is a free Powerpoint-to-Flash converter. The neat thing about this software is that it can import all the settings from a powerpoint slide including narration, rehearsed timing, custom animation etc. Here is a great review on AuthorPoint Lite.

• Download and install AuthorPoint Lite
• Import your presentation into AuthorPoint Lite.
• Save it as a swf file.

Uploading the swf file

Now upload the saved swf file to your webserver, and provide a link to it on your website. This swf file is your presentation complete with your narration, animation, slide timings, your slide notes, etc. And the best part is that sinceits a swf file, any browser with a flash plugin can play this file! Truly portable!

Enjoy

The End

Let us begin with pictures, shall we?

To the left, is a picture of students of DAV College in Chandigargh protesting St. Valentine’s Day and the public display of affection by, well, people. And to the right is a group of people in Manhattan protesting the war in Iraq.

Do you see any difference between the two? No? In that case, let us move to another example:

To the left is the office of dean in IIT Karaghpur (Please correct me if I am wrong), and to right is the engineering college in Stanford [more here]. Now, do you see what I am getting at? Or did I lose you further?

No, this is not a `US-is-better-than-India’ post, this is beyond that. It is about art and its influence on us. Just look at the pictures in the left column, and pictures in the right column. What you see in the left are the symptoms of the artless, while the right is just a glimpse of how art influences life.

It is unfortunate that we as a society are increasingly distancing ourselves from art. This can be seen in the falling quality of our movies (barring a refreshing few) over the decades. This can be seen in the increasing barbaric nature of our disagreements (from the Bombay riots to Godhara to Nandigram). This can be seen in the state of our public utility buildings (the red streaks for pan and tobacco in every corner). What does all of this have to do with art? Actually, quite a lot!

Art is a means of controlled expression. When you repress or discourage art, you lose the means of control, and its only a matter of time before society finds some means of expression. This new mean, unfortunately, has no control (because if it did, then it would be art). This manifests itself as an abomination which we refer to in different avenues as `movies’, or ‘protests’, or pretty much any form of expression you can think of.

But that’s just the half of it. When you lose art, you are not just losing pretty pictures, or soothing music, you are losing the ability to sympathize, the ability to empathize; you are losing emotion and feeling itself. Its all too common to hear a parent tell their kid “Don’t waste your time drawing pictures, its not going to put bread on the table tomorrow.”, or “What good is your acting going to do when you have struggle for your next morsel? Go pick up your textbooks and concentrate!”. And the child will listen, it will do well in school too, but when it actually comes down to having some happiness in life, the child would rather solve second degree partial differential equations than dance. It’s no joke: we are raising a generation devoid of art, a generation with no sympathy. A generation which sees injustice meted out to people, and yet doesn’t react because it cannot feel sympathy. A generation whose eyes don’t tear up to Taare Zameen Par because they ‘get it’ but they don’t ‘feel it’. A generation which looks puzzled if a stranger smiles at them. A generation which doesn’t understand how to express itself and vents itself through hysterical screams, violent mobs, and arson.

We, as Indians, are already building such a generation. We have taken away most of the playgrounds for high rise apartments and multinational corporations. We have already stifled our children’s creative spark for the rote of the textbooks and the multitude entrance examinations. We are replacing the people in our children’s lives with TVs, Computers, and a set of spare keys to the empty house.

There is only so much further down you can go before you hit rock bottom. What good is all the wealth in the world if you can’t shed a tear for it?

This would have been yet another time when a ‘public servant’ placed himself above authority; only this time, the authority won. That’s right folks, in the first incident of its kind, a pilot deplaned an MP for rude behavior and delaying the flight.

There are two versions of the incident making the rounds. The first one, by the MP Abdul Wahab, says that the MP was on time, but the ground staff was slow in seating the passengers. This infuriated the pilot Rajat Rana and he same stomping down the aisle screaming at the ground staff. Unable to tolerate such unacceptable behavior towards the ‘common man’, our honorable MP intervened. The pilot asked him to take of running the country while he takes care of running the aircraft. At this point, the MP called him a glorified driver. The pilot, finding this insult intolerable, asked the MP to deplane.

The second version is that the MP was late in arriving to begin with. When the pilot was inquiring about the reason for the delay, the pilot was told it was because of the MP. The MP then stormed into the cockpit to explain that he was an MP, and so privileged. This was a breach of security, and the pilot (rightly) asked him to deplane.

Amidst the confusion over the precise sequence of events, the following quotes by the MP Abdul Wahab stand out:

• “Rana [the pilot] is nothing but a glorified driver.” : So pilots are nothing but glorified drivers?!? So…. all that training that goes into becoming a commercial airline pilot is just… well… glorified reading-writing-and-arithmetic? At the very least this is indicative of our noble MP’s respect for the dignity of labor.
• “If this is the kind of treatment that a Parliament member has to face then what would be the experience of the common man” : Of course, a Parliament member is far above the common man (at times, even the law), and so deserves to be treated like royalty. As a ‘public servant’, should always be treated better than the public. This is, of course, notwithstanding how a public servant should treat the public (including the pilot). And the last I checked, the common man has been treated fairly well in aircrafts in India.
• “I intervened and told him not to abuse the official he told me it’s none of your business to intervene. I said I am an MP and it’s my right to interfere.”: So if you are an MP, then you are everyone’s boss. Even the airline pilot’s boss. Never mind the fact that you are called a ‘Public Servant’ for a reason. Its just a misnomer, its more like ’sanctioned mafioso’.

This is not the first time a politician has stalled progress. Be it by arriving late at a function, deciding to have a twenty-car motorcade with police protection pass through the cities busiest roads during rush hour, or arriving late to an aircraft and keep all other passenger waiting. And for once, someone stood up and said, ‘I wont take this bulls**t anymore’. And the knee jerk reaction is to move for a privileged motion against the pilot in the parliament! Apparently, Mr. Wahab’s deplaning is so much more important then other problems like inflation, wheat shortage, and stock market falls, that this motion is to be placed ahead of all other matters (yup, that’s what a privileged motion means)!

The megalomania astounds me. Every time I think the politicians can’t sink any lower, they come right back and surprise me. Oh abomination, thy name is politicians.

Biofuel has been marketed as the fuel for the future, our key to independence from oil and the middle east, the solution to global warming, and everything else under the sun. But the reality is very different from the propaganda. As it turns out, the so called corn-based ‘clean’ fuel is not so clean after all. To understand why, lets see why people claim biofuel to be all that they say it is.

The most salient argument is that: since biofuel is ‘brewed’ from organic sources like corn, and its easy to grow corn, the source serves to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, and since we are not burning fossil fuels, we are reducing global warming.

While its true that the source of biofuel is organic, not all sources are equally viable. For instance, consider corn. Corn gives you a 3:1 energy yield, i.e. you spend 1 unit of energy to get 3 units of energy from corn. Not the most efficient. Also, this one unit of energy often comes from fossil fuels. Secondly, ‘brewing’ ethanol from corn requires extremely sterile and specialized equipment. They require, for instance, large stainless steel containers. Now this 3:1 ratio does not take into account the kind of energy needed to manufacture such high grade stainless steel (this cost is assumed to be amortized across multiple crops of corn that can use it to produce energy). But the fact of the matter is, if everyone switches to corn-based fuel, then the manufacturing of such huge numbers of high-grade steel will only serve to make the CO2 emissions a more acute problem. Thirdly, corn is a tropical crop which needs large amounts of water, and is susceptible to diseases. This makes growing corn a resource intensive enterprise, not my idea of a solution to reducing our (non-renewable) energy consumption.

An unfortunate side effect of using corn for biofuel is the following: large amounts of corn is being diverted from food supple chain to the industry. This is raising the food prices world wide. This has made growing corn very profitable, and so countries like Brazil are deforesting the amazon at an alarming rate to plant corn. Such logging, deforestation, and burning is accelerating global warming even more! (for more details visit the Time Magazine article on Clean Energy Scam).

The problem, if fact, is not with biofuel itself, but with corn. Corn is not the most energy efficient choice, its traditional use is as food, and the procedure to brew fuel is too complex, sensitive, and sophisticated. So if we can have a source which is (a) energy efficient, (b) not a food source, and (c) easy to manufacture fuel from, we might be able to have a viable ‘green’ source after all.

We do have such a source: Biomass. That’s right, biomass, the dead and/or decaying compost of plant and animal remains. Think about it. Biomass has been used in rural India as a source of fuel for cooking (Gobar Gas). So can we use biomass as the source for biofuel like ethanol? Yes, we can! Mark Holtzapple from Texas A&M University is working on this. As he says it “I have been working on biofuels since before it was cool”.

In an interview (on Biofuel, in the radio show Biased Transmission) , Mark Holtzapple said that biomass can be used as a viable source for biofuel with tremendous success. The energy yield is as high as 18:1. The brewery is easy to build and maintain. The experimental setups he has is made of plastic buckets! It uses natural bacteria and enzymes to break the biomass down into ethanol. Its easy to use, easy to maintain, and can provide energy without taking away valuable food from the market, without incentivizing developing nations to destroy their forests and plant something profitable. Its all great and wonderful, but no one is paying attention.

Why, you ask? Its because the US government, and the oil lobby, has too much invested in corn that it doesn’t want to go back on it, not matter what the costs. So the next time someone talks of corn based biofuel, please cringe a little because that’s the right thing to do.

Finally, its here. The prototype of India’s new sex education manual is ready! It’s all fine and wonderful except for the fact that it talks about everything except sex. That’s right, we now have a neutered sex education manual of little utilitarian value. Its unfortunate to see such an important issue be muddied by politics, religion, prejudices, and irrational conservatism.

Fact: India is fast becoming the global epicenter for AIDS. Fact: HIV is sexually transmitted. Fact: India has a population exceeding 1 Billion. Fact: The rise is India’s population is due to lack to awareness about sex and family planning.

This simply means that an effective sex education component is essential to any solution that attempts to address the issue of population and the AIDS epidemic. But this component has now been rendered ineffective due to the dilution of the content in the proposed sex education manual.
For instance, they “deleted all images and learning modules that states had found too explicit and too graphic”, use of the phrase “sexual intercourse” has been drastically reduced, the flip charts used to explain about HIV/AIDS has been omitted because it was found to be culturally insensitive, and so on.

What surprises me is that no one bothered to ask the question: “What will this manual achieve?” One of biggest reasons for spread of HIV/AIDS is unprotected sex. If there is no focus on sex itself, then what good is this manual? Of course, lets not even talk about homosexuality. The manual cannot contain anything about homosexuality because Indians can never be gay. So much for trying to combat the spread of HIV/AIDS! Whether you like it or not, there is an increasing trend of younger people experimenting with sex, and even being promiscuous. This is trend is not going to change by simply wishing it. The effort has to be to educate the younger crowd about it. Bring the issue out in the open, and teach them to be responsible about it. But, of course, it is culturally insensitive to talk about sex. And so, what we have is a ticking time bomb in our hands.

There are many reasons why India needs an effective sex education programme. Yes, it will mean breaking tradition, it will mean forcing people out of their comfort zone, it will mean confronting some less than desirable truths about your children and your society. But if we do not do it now, we may never be able to! It has taken a lot of lobbying and effort to get the green signal for an sex ed. program. We now have a great opportunity at getting it right the first time. Making amendments later will be very difficult. I am afraid, that by the time the society realizes its folly, it may be too late.

I was reading VK Narayanan’s post advocating the criminalization of drugs last week. The post was a rebuttal of Jug Suraiya’s argument for legalization of drugs. It was an interesting exercise in analytical deconstruction insofar as it did NOT yield itself to such a deconstruction. It reminds me of Richard Bach’s quote from ‘Running from safety’ — “Compelling reason will never convince blinding emotion.”
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Having lived in the US for over three and a half years, having seen the politics here, the blatant lies, the discrimination, the complete lack of moral responsibility or compass that the administration and the public choose to brandish, I have always savored the hard earned yearly trips back to India in December. I have always felt a sense of freedom in India that I missed here in the US. But the events that unfolded in the last two weeks have forced me to re-evaluate this freedom I perceived. It was perhaps, all an illusion.

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I wrote an article on Rediff about the importance of networking in context with studying abroad (in the US). What I had to say holds true for pretty much everyone. So here is a more general version of the article that appeared in Rediff.

Networking is the act of expanding one’s social sphere of influence by initiating mutually advantageous new relationships with people. Your network, if maintained well, could be the most effective tool for your success.

Depending on the nature of the relationships you build, networks can be classified into four types: (a) Academic networks, (b) Professional networks, (c) Social networks, and (d) Service networks.

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