Changing 3 nationalities in one day (Bangladesh,Russia,Pallakkad :)).
Standing and Swaying for 6 hrs .
Jiving to some excellent African music.
Tried convincing the crowds that I dont belong either to Russia or Bangladesh.
Instructed how to eat Tanya’s pan cakes and why they were .. Russian Dosas.
Presented the Mendeleev’s periodic table of molecules.
….
hmmm … a wonderful day. After all these years … I know what AIESEC truly represents. A group of young,energetic troupe of happy people from all over.
Something struck me just now.. I was looking into the general internet statistics of some of the Asian countries. For example Bhutan is supposed to have only 25,000 internet users and its rising. Similarly there are other countries which have such a small but growing population of internet users. But who are these users?. Taking India as example, the internet was available early on to users from research and educational establishments to elite business users. It also was available to the “rich” ( Arent they elite :)?).
Isnt this elite a market in itself?. This market exists in every country where “internet” is emerging in. What are the products and services that can be operated across all these markets without being too specific?
Try searching for “Web Designer” on google. I did that yesterday as I was searching for a good freelancing designer on the web. It gave me the following results
More than half of the results were not relevant for me. What other possible meaning could such a query mean other than looking for a “web designer”? A significant number of users would use that query with the expectation that the results would be a list of top web designers. I have been noticing this need repeating in many of my searches and not exactly limited to the above query.
So .. Is there a different way that we can get a system to understand what we really mean than to play around with ‘keywords’ to obtain the relevant results and fool the rankings?. Here is an attempt.
Consider del.icio.us. Its a community approach at organizing the web( in whatever form ). “Tags” have become the way to organize the web and tagging can enable a user to create keywords to remember a link with. So what pages would be tagged “web designer”?
Here is the result:
7 results - pointing to web designers website
2 results - pointing to resources for designers
1 result - pointing to something random
Voila! .. its so much better. But they still are not my top 10 lists but they definitely are more relavant. But the above approach has a significant limitation. It depends upon people to find the page and tag it else the page cannot be found. This cannot happen for the zillion other pages in the world.
Now, in reality different people tag pages in different ways with certain common keywords. In effect they give a personality to those pages by choosing a bunch of words. So what we end up with is a bunch of personalities for a page just like humans. This is similar to an individual’s take on what kind of “personality” another possesses. Each person’s take might differ and may have something in common.
This got me to start wondering about the possibilities of using an “Artificially intelligent” way to tag the web. But if you have a robot figuring out a way to tag information then it would end up associating a particular personality to a page which might be robotic in nature :). But then lets say we could somehow create different ontological descriptions for the same page with these robots. Apply page rank or Personality Rank (TM - I need to figure this out still ;)) relevance on this and I bet we will have better search results.
Now .. I will go figure out my robot and Personality Rank(TM). If you have any ideas please shoot :).
Pathetic .. pathetic .. I am sorry .. I am writing this review. I wasted 2.5 hours of my life watching a slipshod bollywood attempt at copying Quentin Tarantino. What started out to be a comedy …. started to pan out as a thriller ….to become a comedy .. to become a pathetic attempt to make a movie. I and my friend ended up spotting the extras used being reused and the settings being reused with different set of furniture. Its funny that the movie is named “Cash”. Since the director started cutting “cash” by substituting most of his scenes with cartoons.
On the other hand South Africa looks really cool ( If it was South Africa). a place to visit for sure.
Decided to go to ‘Partner’ today. A must watch .. more than anything else for Govinda’s return. If it was only Salman khan acting in the movie I would not have been able to handle the melodrama and abysmal acting. Although the script is flimsy David Dhawan sure knows how to hold attention. Right from the start Govinda pulls the movie through with his ability to do non stop nonsense. The movie is hilarious with witty dialogues and Share -o-shayari.
Salman does make up for not being able to act by making fun of himself . Exposing his tits at the drop of a feather, I guess he ends up satisfying the ladies or ‘Kiran’. But then I would just making this review uninteresting if I keep appreciating Salman ..So except for Govinda everybody else were nothing but stooges. I couldn’t understand what Lara Dutt was doing in the movie. I guess she tried to be the hot babe who realizes that she is a single mother all of a sudden and doesnt know how to handle being both…crap. Katherina Kaif, oh that gorgeous lady with a heavily accented endi and british english…. Any guesses why she is in the movie?? ….yep.. Salman.
Anywayz … I did enjoy most of the movie and it should entertain your weekend.
Websites do have a personality .. dont they. That was what struck me today when I read an article about semantic web. Lately,I have been trying to get uptodate about this new approach towards redesigning the web.
There are personal sites,corporate sites, services on the web. What would happen if they can talk to each other? Strange things can emerge. For example lets say .. my blog site can talk to a another blog site …say Harsha’s ..It could find that it had certain similar traits like topics posted on,blogging habits etc. Or may be a product offering on a site can be ontologically matched with a requirement somewhere on the web. I wonder the possibilities that can emerge from such a simple “ability to talk”…. … still dreamin abt it :).
How would you define progress?. Is progress defined by better infrastructure, better per capita, more number of industries, employment generation … etc?. I have always felt that the way the term “development” was defined seemed to connote materialistic progress. Accordingly if you are able to afford your weekly coke supply, afford an annual holiday in Hawaii, gift an Ipod for Christmas,drive a car , have pothole free roads and have an big GDP then you are a “developed” society. The US of A would be a perfect example of such a “developed” nation.
Isnt this a skewed way of looking at development? Would such a “concept” of development have mattered to my grandfather who hailed from a rural village in Kerala?. Definitely not. The same is true to many who live in the so called “under developed” or “developing” nations. Isnt it then possible to live a happy life without the consumerism that afflicts todays “developing” societies? Can’t “development” happen in harmony with our environment? We definitely can. Thats where I believe the GNH ( Gross National Happiness) method of measuring progress can contribute in a big way. The GNH approach provides for the individual’s happiness at the centre of measurement of any kind of development. The way one measures it is very subjective and not necessarily applicable across all communities or nations. For example Bhutan( The King of bhutan originally proposed GNH) measures GNH on the basis of promotion of equitable and sustainable socio-economic development, preservation and promotion of cultural values, conservation of the natural environment, and establishment of good governance. This measurement of progress puts the core national values as part of the definition of progress.
GNH enables us to make choices like trading GDP growth to environmental concerns. It enables us to choose the kind of development path we walk on. The current paradigm of development is influenced heavily by the west and reinforced by institutions like the world bank. I wonder how far GNH would go in terms of adoption, but if it does then I believe half the problems of humanity will disappear.
