I was reading this recent article about how America might be lagging behind many other nations in terms of infrastructure. This is not to suggest that America is anywhere as bad as India when it comes to infrastructures rather the author, Thomas Friedman takes the examples of the John Kennedy Airport and Hong Kong's ultra-modern airport (on a related note, Discovery Channel's "Extreme Engineering" program once covered the entire process that went into the building of the Honk Kong airport) to show that America might not be _the_ best in the world anymore.

Shortly later, I chanced upon this presentation by Dmitry Orlov drawing parallels between the erstwhile USSR and the United States of America. A short quote from the transcript:

The Soviet manned space program is alive and well under Russian management, and now offers first-ever space charters. The Americans have been hitching rides on the Soyuz while their remaining spaceships sit in the shop.

The arms race has not produced a clear winner, and that is excellent news, because Mutual Assured Destruction remains in effect. Russia still has more nuclear warheads than the US, and has supersonic cruise missile technology that can penetrate any missile shield, especially a nonexistent one.

The Jails Race once showed the Soviets with a decisive lead, thanks to their innovative GULAG program. But they gradually fell behind, and in the end the Jails Race has been won by the Americans, with the highest percentage of people in jail ever.

The Hated Evil Empire Race is also finally being won by the Americans. It's easy now that they don't have anyone to compete against.

Technorate Tags: Soviet, USSR, USA

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I had blogged earlier about how the Chemistry department of CEG, Anna University had gotten into trouble for plagiarism charges. Now it looks like there are more charges [Google Cache] leveled against the university. I myself completed my undergrad from the very same college and I should clarify that this is NOT a rampant practice. Not once in my time there has any of the faculty encouraged stealing of ideas.

To start off, I think the authors had this coming and completely deserve the shame. It is one thing to gather ideas from multiple papers and present marginal deltas over them. But to actually copy-paste text and figures from other sources WITHOUT crediting the original sources is blatant plagiarism done with the motive of hiding the sources. The paper itself appears to be more of a literature survey written in oversized font sizes and has limited novelty. The authors seem to have missed the point that citing work is good and it only increases the credibility of their work.

In their defense I no not think it fair to blame the students. These are undergrad students with absolutely NO exposure to the research arena (CEG is more of a teaching university rather than a research university). The professor has to take the responsibility for this case, for it is the professor who should have reviewed the paper and guided the students in the right direction. There is a very clear lack of ethics here. Also, I have little regard for the HiPC poster session. I myself published a poster at the '06 edition of HiPC, the contents of which I am not particularly proud of.

From the looks of Prof. Bhaskaran Raman's page, it looks like this is just one of many plagiarized submissions he found (the title ends with the suffix "-1"). I am sure CEG is not the only university to have done this. Exposing more such cases is sure to reduce the incidence of such events and also reduce the pressure on reviewers.

Persisting on topic of ethics, the page also mentions this paper as a "submission" to HiPC '08. I am not sure if this was accepted or not. What are your views on criticizing publicly about a work that has not been officially published?

Technorati Tags: CEG,Anna University,Plagiarism,Bhaskar Raman

Oh gosh when did I start falling for cheesy movies like this. But I just so love it!

Thanks VC!

Technorati Tags: Validation,Short Film

We find it very hard to conceptualize past the first 3 dimensions of nature, i.e. length, width and depth. Well not really; we are also well aware of the 4^th dimension which is none other than time itself. We don't necessarily think of time as a dimension for, we cannot influence time as directly as for example squeezing a ball. The 4th dimension is as much as what the human brain can comprehend for we live in a 4 dimensional world. However there exists a 5^th dimension which forms the entire basis of what a select few scientists in the world work on every day - the field of Quantum Mechanics (which Albert Einstein himself refuted as being "unrealistic" given its complex nature). The presence of a 5^th dimension would basically mean that for every action that we perform we follow an independent path in the 5^th dimension, i.e. every time each one of us make a choice be it our own or influenced by chance or by others, we forge a different path in the 5^th dimension. The 6^th dimension extends this idea to refer to the possibility of moving between states, i.e. moving from one point in the 5^th dimension to another immediately. What this effectively means is that at any given instant in time (i.e. the 4^th dimension), there exists an infinite number of parallel worlds representing each possible action in the real world. This assumption is also the basic concept behind the Schrodinger's Cat experiment. As described in Wikipedia:

Schrödinger's Cat: A cat, along with a flask containing a poison, is placed in a sealed box shielded against environmentally induced quantum decoherence. If a Geiger counter detects radiation then the flask is shattered, releasing the poison which kills the cat. Quantum mechanics suggests that after a while the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when we look in the box, we see the cat either alive or dead, not a mixture of alive and dead.

An excellent presentation on how to conceptualize the 10 dimensions of nature is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjsgoXvnStY and I would highly recommend that you go through this extremely well presented narration. There is also a book by the same folks on the Tenth Dimension whose website is http://www.tenthdimension.com

Technorati Tags: Dimensions,Physics

Image by dfarber via Flickr

One incident in particular introduced Ozzie to the magic that comes when people connect via computer. He had taken a part-time assignment helping a professor finish writing some courseware. The prof lived on the other side of town, so Ozzie collaborated with him remotely. Ozzie came to know and like his boss, save for one annoyance. "He was the worst typist ever," Ozzie says. "He was very eloquent on email, but on Term Talk it was just dit-dit-dit, sometimes an error, but agonizingly slow." At the end of the project, the man threw a party at his house, and Ozzie discovered the reason for the typing problem: The professor was a quadriplegic and had been entering text by holding a stick in his teeth and poking it at the keyboard. Ozzie was floored.

[Source: WIRED]

/me takes a mental note to not judge people as often. WIRED has an excellent article on how Ray Ozzie is changing Microsoft. I did get an opportunity to meet Mr. Ozzie personally and he was just as soft-spoken as the article suggests.

Technorati Tags: Ray Ozzie,Microsoft

In the U.S., there’s a crisis of confidence, In India, for the first time after decades or centuries, there is a sense of optimism about the future, a sense that our children’s futures can be better than ours if we try hard enough.

--Nandan Nilekani

[Source: NYTimes]

Technorati Tags: Nandan Nilekani,India,USA

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