Tuesday, June 21, 2011
O Tablet, My Tablet: Sakshat, India's $35 tablet
Five years ago, the then education secretary thought of taking on Nicholas Negroponte's $100 laptop. One and a half years after his demise,this June, HRD Minister Kapil Sibal unveiled a Rs 1500 ($35) laptop. But what is it actually??
This project was initially a drive to provide technology based education to rural children,. This along with cheap internet was supposed to help farmers find out about weather, fertilizers, proper, communicate with other farmers and fix the selling price of their product. This was the project Project Simputer(started in 2000-01). [The very second post of this blog was on the Simputer.] I spent my 2009 summer in IITG working on one of these local language speech recognition projects under Dr. P.K. Das. No idea what happened to it. :(
Back to Shakshat. This 7" LCD resistive touchscreen tablet is powered by an Android OS and has all basic functionality lik
As a part of India’s National Mission for Education, Information and Communication Technology (NMEICT) 504 universities and 25,000 colleges countrywide would be the recipients of these laptops. [Not sure, it might also be institutes of the sub-continent]
10,000 Sakshat tablets will be shipped to IIT Jaipur by June-end, and in four months 90, 000 units will be distributed among other IITs. Nevertheless it is interesting to see how something aimed at the farmers and their children, ultimately ends up in the top colleges of the country. I sure hope that a few of these are siphoned out and sold in the grey market! Cheers!
Monday, November 1, 2010
Publishing for the "Average Joe"
For people like me IEEE has been the Tinseltown of academic publishing. But many feel IEEE to be a joke, where you end up paying a lot of money for no good reason (except for the cool newsletters and stuff which lame coders and wannabes can flaunt in front of their friends).
A few years back we saw a new funda called Open Access Journal make it really big. And today it has evolved (or perhaps devolved) to such an extent where we can "PUBLISH" whatever we want.
Anyway, everything went well for me- I passed with GOOD grades, got placed, but one day I wondered if I could publish something as a proper research work, with minimum effort that is. In my fourth year
engineering project under SAURAVJYOTI SARMAH in Jorhat Engineering College we proposed a novel algorithm which could detect human faces in any image, the USP being less processing time. It was entitled "Face Detection Algorithm based on Skin color segmentation and Density Grid
Clustering". And guess what?! I did it! I did it with the help of all the people who fostered the idea of open publishing, free knowledge and a little known website called publishresearch.com (Btw, it doesn't even have a section for Computer Science. My dissertation is in in the "Others" category).
Whatever be it, point is that Timothy R. Lalhmangaiha, Biswajit Boruah and Zubin Bhuyan have finally published a research paper. :P
Hahahaha.... Now, suck on that!!
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
On C#, TFS, CIL and "Chai 4 All"!
Have you ever met a person who could wobble his ears??
Or someone whose knowledge was as vast (and random) as Wikipedia??
Well, if you ask me, I'd say "YES!"
Its my third day at indigo Architects and I have seen it all. "Sh*t" maybe OK here, but "SIR", my friend, is a serious crime,- the punishment being sentenced to make the evening tea for everyone.
Sent a mail without subject?? Evening tea!
Late for the morning assembly at 9:30 -> Evening tea!
Apart from all these, we have The Great Varun Raj Minocha, aka VRM, who has left no stone unturned to elevate us minions from a B/W C land, to the more organized world of C#. Its all in how you visualize, he says. We also have Amar and Gourav trying to polish us into something usable....
Thursday, January 7, 2010
Dilbert's Theorem
Give this a read if you question why people who know much less than you are earning much more than you are.
Dilbert’s “Salary Theorem” states that “Engineers and scientists can never earn as much as business executives and sales people.”
This theorem can now be supported by a mathematical equation based on the following
Two postulates:
Postulate 1: Knowledge is Power
Postulate 2: Time is Money
As every engineer knows: Power = Work / Time
Since Knowledge = Power
And: Time = Money
The result is : Knowledge = Work / Money
Solving for Money, we get: Money = Work / Knowledge.
Thus, as knowledge approaches zero, Money approaches infinity, regardless of the amount of work done.
Conclusion: The less you know, the more money you make.
Although this shouldn’t be taken seriously, I’m sure there are times when you might find this useful to cheer yourself up and just move on to things that you should put more focus on or at least have some control on.
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