Anjali Arora on Web applications, personal information management, FoundIt

Defining who/what you are, & more importantly, what you are not

aarora — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 19:03:00 +0000

FoundIt has evolved, a little at a time, but based on my own fascination with helping to get to information when we need it. The problems now are problems of plenty: there is too much information even on our own computers, & a lot of what we do everyday may be easily avoided, if only we remembered that we had done this before, & have the stuff somewhere.

So the current FoundIt you see now is one that has grown organically out of our understanding & experiences with managing information,as well as what some early user surveys revealed. But this version is still an underpainting. Those of you not familiar with this term, an underpainting comprises the initial broad strokes that a painter puts on the canvas, to essentially map out masses & tones on the canvas, oftentimes using a single color such as sepia or a yellow ochre. This is a great means to break down all the decisions that go into a painting into manageable, distinguishable ones. Once the artist is happy with what he sees in the underpainting, she can start to put in more detail & volume & color.

So with FoundIt, the underpainting is in place. The way we hope to develop FoundIt is organically, based on your experiences & what you'd like to see the application do. I see the latest issue of Time magazine has 'You' as Person of the Year, because well, you control the information age. This isn't really as ridiculous as it sounds at first. There has been a huge shakedown of a lot of institutions in the last year or two: big media, publishing, social software that makes ordinary people capable of contributing to & being heard in a way never seen before. And as a designer, I do believe that the best applications need to be made from the inside out, growing & developing based on actual needs & experiences. So FoundIt will continue its goal of an application that brings your key information to the forefront, just in time, every time.

And equally we have to be clear about what we will not be. In the recent weeks that we have been promoting FoundIt with various groups/ people, blogs, we have heard back from a Venture Capitalist or two that they are interested only in funding social software. That's interesting but oddly, we had gotten in touch with them because they are avid bloggers & not because we were looking for VC money. But it certainly got me thinking that if one did need a lot of money to get up & running, one would spend not only a lot of time & energy in other activities such as writing business plans & making ridiculous 5 year forecasts, but that one would also be under immense pressure to alter the complexion & nature of the product. We are more than willing to shape this & other products based on user feedback; but to have a financier twist you out of shape simply because everyone in their tribe is looking to birth the next YouTube or MySpace is absurd. At least to me. And thankfully for us, we do not need millions of dollars to bring our ideas to fruition.

And so we will continue down the path of organic, evolutionary growth.

Ethics of eating

aarora — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 22:51:00 +0000

Came across this moving piece (thanks to my husband Ravi for pointing me to it) in the Times of India, Ahmedabad about how we get our food these days. The innocuous-looking piece of meat on your table has had a long, sad history; and we humans believe we are a civilized lot! It is shameful that in our quest for more efficiency & profit, we are denying these creatures grass & sunlight. Read on to feel justly angry....

Ethics Of Eating
Mass production of meat is senseless, dangerous
By PETER SINGER

Global meat consumption is predicted to double by 2020. Yet in Europe and North America, there is growing concern about the ethics of the way meat and eggs are produced. Consumption of veal has fallen sharply since it became widely known that to produce so-called white, actually pale pink veal, newborn calves are separated from their mothers, deliberately made anaemic, denied roughage, and kept in stalls so narrow that they cannot walk or turn around.
In Europe, mad cow disease shocked many people, not only because it shattered beef ’s image as a safe and healthy food, but also because they learned that the disease was caused by feeding cattle the brains and nerve tissue of sheep. People naively believed that cows ate grass. I discovered that beef cattle in feed lots may be fed anything from corn to fish meal, chicken litter (complete with chicken droppings), and slaughterhouse waste.
Concern about how we treat farm animals is far from being limited to the small percentage of people who are vegetarians or even vegans eating no animal products at all. Despite strong ethical arguments for vegetarianism, it is not yet a mainstream position. More common is the view that we are justified in eating meat, as long as the animals have a decent life before they are killed.
The problem, as Jim Mason and I describe in our recent book, The Way We Eat, is that industrial agriculture denies animals even a minimally decent life. Tens of billions of chickens produced today never go outdoors. They are bred to have voracious appetites and gain weight as fast as possible, then reared in sheds that can hold more than 20,000 birds. The level of ammonia in the air from their accumulated droppings stings the eye and hurts the lungs. Slaughtered at only 45 days old, their immature bones can hardly bear the weight of their bodies. Some collapse and, unable to reach food or water, soon die, their fate irrelevant to the economics of the enterprise as a whole.
Conditions are, if anything, even worse for laying hens crammed into wire cages so small that even if there were just one per
cage, she would be unable to stretch her wings. But there are usually at least four hens per cage, and often more. Under such crowded conditions, the more dominant,aggressive birds are likely to peck to death the weaker hens in the cage. To prevent this, producers sear off all birds’ beaks with a hot blade. A hen’s beak is full of nerve tissue — it is, after all, her principal means of relating to her environment — but no anaesthetic or analgesic is used to relieve the pain.
Pigs may be the most intelligent and sensitive of the animals that we commonly eat. When foraging in a rural village, they can exercise that intelligence and explore their varied environment. Before they give birth, sows use straw or leaves and twigs to build a comfortable and safe nest in which to nurse their litter. But in today’s factory farms, pregnant sows are kept in crates so narrow that they cannot turn around, or even walk more than a step forward or backward. They lie on bare concrete without straw or any other form of bedding. The piglets are taken from the sow as soon as possible, so that she can be made pregnant again, but they never leave the shed until they are taken to slaughter.
Defenders of these production methods argue that they are a regrettable but necessary response to a growing population’s demand for food. On the contrary, when we confine animals in factory farms, we have to grow food for them. The animals burn up most of that food’s energy just to breathe and keep their bodies warm, so we end up with a small fraction — usually no more than one-third and sometimes as little as one-tenth — of the food value that we feed them. By contrast, cows grazing on pasture eat food that we cannot digest, which means that they add to the amount of food available to us.
It is tragic that countries like China and India, as they become more prosperous, are copying western methods and putting animals in huge industrial farms to supply more meat and eggs for their growing middle classes. If this continues, the result will be animal suffering on an even greater scale than now exists in the West, as well as more environmental damage and a rise in heart disease and cancers of the digestive system. It will also be grossly inefficient.
As consumers, we have the power and the moral obligation to refuse to support farming methods that are cruel to animals and bad for us.

The writer is professor of bioethics atPrinceton University. Copyright: Project Syndicate

Download FoundIt now!

aarora — Sun, 26 Nov 2006 18:55:00 +0000

We are now offering FoundIt beta free to download. Some links of interest:

What is FoundIt [Download available from the right column of this same page]

Product Tour

This is just the beginning. We aim to explore exciting ideas in interface design for information retrieval, as also bringing meaningful information to you the user. So try FoundIt, & send us your feedback.

FoundIt beta is ready for release!!!

aarora — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 13:45:00 +0000

We are very excited to be releasing FoundIt(beta) for you to try out. FoundIt is a web-based application that gives you a bird's eye-view of all the files & documents on your computer. In addition it allows you to tag & chunk content for easier retrieval & re-use.

So check out the FoundIt page & sign up to try FoundIt.

Breath of fresh air

aarora — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 02:38:00 +0000

In the humdrum of everyday work, there come those moments when one breathes deep & full, those moments when one sees exciting, adventurous work. Such a moment came for me today watching a documentary on Frank Gehry's work on PBS ( BTW, this wonderful channel amidst the crap that goes in the name of entertainment TV channels has given me & my family so many wonderful moments, I owe it big!). His process, his inspiration, and his amazing work: this documentary covered it beautifully. Gehry says his desire to build what he builds now-- in my view, some of his structures look like a child has randomly arranged blocks, sometimes a little awkwardly, so that the viewer gasps at the possibility of one of the blocks tipping over---emanated from a childhood spent building fantastic creations out of left-over wood-blocks that his grandmother would bring in. His Bilbao museum is stunning in the way the burnished metallic shapes melt & flow one moment, stand uptight & rigid the next. The way the earthy browns combined with the blue reflections in the glass walls took my breath away.

I also loved the kind of loose process he has - he sits back, while his assistants add another twisted piece of paper to the model at Gehry's bidding, only to have him make them rearrange it; or when asked why he says he likes a shape, or what materials he will finally use, his answer is very often "I don't know yet".

For me personally, the challenge is to see how I can combine my passions for painting with my work in interface & interaction design. I don't know how I am going to tackle this one, not yet anyway, but I do know that the idea has been brewing in my head for a while.

And some more....

aarora — Mon, 28 Aug 2006 13:34:00 +0000

Returning to Ahmedabad, my home city, after almost three years of being away takes some getting used to. The traffic in the streets is overwhelming, there is the constant screech of honking from the interminable stream of two-wheelers & cars & buses flowing merrily down the narrow street. It's a brave soul that walks down these roads, I am thinking, as I try to take the furthest edge of the road, so as not to become just another statistic on my first evening home. My husband though is very unwilling to be pushed to the unpaved edges, & insists on staking claim to the meager strip of paved road; and so we continue down....

I notice right away that at least we are not sharing the road with cows & buffaloes that too prefer to plant themselves bang in the middle of the dry paved roads, especially in these monsoon months. These animals are largely missing now from around my house, & I have to admit, I miss their sight! The next few days I am actually watching out for cows, donkeys, camels, & elephants, & I do manage to sight all of these. I remember a few years ago when we were visiting London, we paid about $10 apiece to visit the London zoo, only to see that the bulk of the animals there were what I used to see on the streets everyday back in Ahmedabad! In fact, add monkeys & peacocks to the list too; driving down the University road in Ahmedabad on this visit, we were forced to stop as a magnificent peacock strutted gracefully across the street.

The other major major change I notice is that the air is so much cleaner. Ahmedabad was infested with old, rickety auto-rickshaws, three-wheeled vehicles that raced across pot-holed streets, giving passengers a cheap but unforgettably bumpy ride. These rickshaws were noisy, & let off such angry black, malodorous fumes that one's eyes would sting from a short walk outdoors. Thankfully that has changed, we now have what are called 'green rickshaws', that run on CNG & are quiet enough so that one can actually have a conversation while riding in one of these!

The city buses too have switched to CNG; the streets are full of Toyotas, Hondas, Marutis, Fords, as also assorted scooters & motor cycles. The clean air has made it possible for chronic walkers like me & my husband to reclaim the outdoors. Our son, though, continues to wrinkle his nose at the mention of any physical activity!!

The monsoons have begun in earnest, & everyday brings heavy rains, slushy streets, cool breezes, & awful moisture-laden fruit & vegetables that spoil in very little time. Still Ahmedabad is lucky unlike Surat, that had Katrina-like flooding this past month; entire areas of the city were marooned & cut off for days on end.

I loved that most of the little shops around my house are still around. Everything looks familiar & comfortable in that respect. But there has been a burgeoning growth of shopping malls, restaurants, & some totally new fads for this once very conservative city: hookah joints. After an evening out with friends, one of our hosts offers to take us to an exciting coffee shop. Once there, we are told that the only available table they have is outdoors, & we take it. I couldn't for the life of me fathom what was exciting about this place to the college-going crowd, the primary consumers of these services. Our table was in a dark, damp corner, with some rain sneaking in through the covers overhead; there were mosquitoes for company. Through the glass doors, we could see young boys & girls sitting on relatively more-comfy chairs & sofas inside the cafe. Today they are having only coffee & snacks & conversation, but as we do a reconnaissance (a favorite term of my son's) of the innards of the 'cafe', we come to a floor that is given over to mattresses strewn across the floor. We are told this is where customers can lie around, puffing away on their hookahs. I later learn that hookahs are harmless contraptions, dispensing flavored water/ steam into willing mouths & noses. ( On our way back to the US via London, we see women as well as men puffing away on their hookahs along Little Beirut).

As I mentioned earlier, Ahmedabadis seem to be reveling in all the glitzy shopping malls all over the city, this once tight-fisted city simply can't seem to get enough of these. In fact, a cursory visitor to the city can be forgiven for thinking that all that the locals do is eat, drink ( not openly, though, for this is a dry state), & shop.

Everything is so expensive, or so it seems to me. I seem to be stuck in a time-warp as it were, and I am having to ask for the price to be repeated ever so often. The economic upswing has pushed up incomes, but has also resulted in sky-rocketing prices, as also insatiable demands for wage hikes by employees. This last fact is so missed by foreign clients getting work done in India, who believe it is their right to demand that work be done at rock-bottom prices.

We had an exciting, eye-opening visit to the RTO for a local driver's license. The process for getting this very basic piece of document is as obtuse & non-transparent as can be. The offices are dark, overcrowded, filthy, & it is impossible to figure out what is to be done next. Our guide/ tout leads us from one desk to another, confident that our job will be done. He informs us dismissively about the new computerised process that will be in place in the next few weeks: it won't work, he declares loftily; the computers have been bought, the company & a few politicians will have made their millions, & now the computers will gather dust, & things will continue as always at the RTO!

India is a foodie's delight, & we dig in every day into our favorite foods. After months, I am starting to enjoy drinking milk. Milk in the US is a horror, I am told it is because the cows are fed some concoction that is certainly not grass! ( This time around, now that I am back in the US & am determined not to buy regular milk here, I chance upon 'Organic milk'; this IS milk, trust me). The other thing that has added enormously to my temporal pleasures while in India is the multiplexes: they are ever so plush & enjoyable, have had a great time watching even indifferent movies here.

Down memory lane

aarora — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 14:01:00 +0000

It is glorious to be back home in India. It has been two years since I was last here, & there's so much that has changed, & yet so much that is as it was.

The long flight from the US to Mumbai is torturous; thankfully there weren't too many loud adults or bawling babies in my vicinity. We finally land in Mumbai around midnight; I totter out to the baggage area, all stiff from sitting in a cramped space too long, & also from sleep & fatigue. Unlike in the US where nothing comes free, including the baggage trolleys, airports in India offer free use of these: I grab one , find a spot near the conveyor belt, & await my baggage. The belt moves into action, & everyone now has their eyes trained on it; after all, baggage comes in only so many shapes & colors, & would be very easy to miss. A couple of bags roll down the belt, & then nothing. For the next 15 minutes, tired & impatient passengers grumble at this holdup, but as with a lot of things in India, waiting it out is the best solution, in this case, was the only solution, as there really were no airline officials to answer our questions. My suitcase arrives, & I dash down the green customs line. I never cease to be amazed at the volumes of baggage people carry with them, even lone passengers. After all what could they be carrying, especially now that India has every global brand available!

It had been agreed that I'd meet my cousin's driver as I stepped out of the airport. I have ostensibly seen this driver on a previous visit, but I was certain I wouldn't recognize him; the sign he'd be carrying with my name would help, so I wasn't too concerned on this point. But the sight that greets me has me bewildered: there are at least four dozen tightly packed signs out there, planted in the hands of equally strange looking faces. I try to take in each sign as I am forced to keep moving by the flow of people behind me. I do not see my man. I check with a helpful policeman if there is a public phone booth near-abouts, & to my great relief, there was one right behind the arrivals area. This booth was manned by a blind man ( a government-aided scheme to provide self-employment to the blind & handicapped) who informs me that the call will cost two rupees ( less than five US cents!!). I am a little hesitant to wake my cousin at 1 in the morning, but heck, she is expecting me, & I desperately needed to find her driver. I get through to her, & she informs me that a car has indeed been sent for me, & I should look carefully at the signs. I joyfully return to the line of bobbing signs, secure in the knowledge that I have not after all been forsaken in the middle of the night. Mumbai is the city of my birth & early childhood, but finding my way around at this unearthly hour was not something I relished. Anyhow, my cousin's Man Friday is indeed there, & we make our way to the packed parking lot. I am amused that three people have come to take me home, & while one of these goes looking for the car & driver amidst the chaos, the other wheels my luggage through. Cell-phones are ubiquitous here, & help locate the missing driver. Finally the car swoops in by our side, everyone gets in swiftly, & we speed off into the night ( this experience reminds me so much of Hindi movie scenes where a screeching getaway car whooshes in to take in the hoodlums after a crime).

We pass by quiet, relatively empty streets, magnificent & brilliantly lit hotels, hovels & makeshift homes by the roadside, & several people sleeping under the flyovers of the city. We finally arrive at our destination, my uncle & cousin's home. It was a very pleasant reunion, making allowances for the unearthly hour; we were meeting after a gap of several years, & seeing them was a throwback to my college days in Mumbai; I was living at this very same uncle's home in those days. Finally we make our way to bed, after all tomorrow was going to be a busy day!

Take our survey: How do you manage your files

aarora — Wed, 17 May 2006 00:12:00 +0000

We'd love you to take our survey about your practices relating to file management. How do you organize your files on your computer; how easy is it to find a certain file after a couple of weeks; what are your pet peeves about finding your personal documents when you need them.

This is a short survey, and shouldn't take more than 10 minutes. We are trying to get a broad variety of feedback, so please go to our survey now!!
Take the survey here.

web 2.0 meets personal information management

aarora — Tue, 25 Apr 2006 14:09:00 +0000

For the past few weeks we have been busy crafting this new app tentatively titled FoundIt!!

Bite-sized, healthy doses of your information, crafted yes, carefully crafted, for delightful & easy consumption, as & when you desire or need. We hope we have stirred up your appetite. Great, because we are counting on you to design this application with us. Just drop us an email at anjali[at]artbrush.net, letting us know you would like to participate in occasional user-testing of this exciting application. If you are in New York city, that's great coz we do hope to meet with some of you in person; but if you are not, that's fine too, & we could do this remotely. So if you are a moderate-heavy user of technology, and are frustrated with finding & keeping information findable, don't wait: send that email now.

Here's some more details about FoundIt:

Imagine having easy access to all of your key personal files, as well as web-based information: easy at hand, ready to go. No more rummaging through endless digital folders & the deep & dark digital recesses of your bottomless hard disk;
Being able to tag pertinent information.
Being able to repurpose your files endlessly: a chunk from here from document A, another from document B, and yet another from a web source, and voila, your new document is ready.
Share files with colleagues & teams online.

So help us design this experience, let's do it!

Tags: Web 2.0, PIM, Findability, User Research , User testing

Making information meaningful

aarora — Tue, 11 Apr 2006 13:05:00 +0000

Last year around the time of my thesis preparation at NYU's ITP program, I remember going off on tangents to seek out research papers on information seeking, document management, making information meaningful: subjects that I am still passionate about.

Thus my deep interest in the Semantic web, and the technologies that will enable more context to be brought into web documents. To be able to harvest deeply from the huge data out there on the internet, to be able to retrieve just the information that a user will find useful, & even further, bringing just-in-time information to her through intelligent systems: how delicious! Like I was half-joking with my students in the Information Architecture class at NYU, we'll need to coin a new word for such information-seeking: search implies an effort on the part of the user, the next five years will have information coming to her, when she needs it, how she needs it. And guess what, we may not need a term for it, for ideally it should be so transparently woven into the design!

RSS feeds are a great development in recent times with information coming to me; and yet it is very easy to be inundated with that too! I had painstakingly put together my feeds in Awasu, but I dare not open the application now: it's overwhelmingly overloaded! A more manageable way seems to be the personal pages such as MS Start page, or one that I particularly like: www.netvibes.com. You can set it as your Home page, so you don't need to remember to fire it up! Also, the clean interface, ajax interactions, & one-page access make information much more usable.

Another area that I am recently finding very interesting, & am digging deeper into is that of data analytics & modeling. My company DecisionCraft is doing excellent work in these areas. To dig into gigabytes of raw data, & to use math & statistics to reveal valuable patterns & insights for future action, is truly catching on with the savvy companies: Amazon being a prime example of a very quantitatively-driven organization, and one where one sees, as a user, the tremendous impact their analytics approach is yielding.

Last week, I participated in a webcast titled 'Competing on Analytics'by Ben Schneiderman of the University of Maryland . He presented some of the work they have done in working with large data sets in assorted industries: hospital & patient records being one. What was very fascinating to me was the visualization of that data (I'll admit it takes a bit of a trained eye to see some of the patterns that he saw, while I was thinking "where, what") , & the ability to drill down into as much detail as the doctor cared to. To be able to see a visualization of say the blood pressure history of a patient over the last 5 years, and further, to be able to see if there is any relationship between this & his worsening arthritis, & to be able to predict potential health problems down the road is very powerful indeed.

I also got an opportunity to ask Schneiderman a question that had been bothering me for quite a while: Most information visualization tools depend on color to convey key patterns. So what about accessibility concerns, the color-blind for example. His answer: most of the tools we have designed allow users to determine the colors they'd like to use, or they could opt for gray-scale too. He adds that you can make the question even harder & ask "what about the blind, can they ever use these tools?". Well, he said, he have worked on a design, it's still in prototype, that translates these patterns into audio. Hmm, sounds interesting, one would need to see, rather hear how effective that is.

Check out Ben Schneiderman's work at www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/

Tags: Data Analytics, Data Modeling, data Mining,Information Architecture

Social space for connecting hearts, rekindling memories

aarora — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 14:36:00 +0000

We have finally got this pet project off the ground: an online social space for people to share their memories from the 1947 partition between India & Pakistan. We have all heard horrific tales from those times: uprootment, terror, homelessness, sudden change in fortunes, & more. But as the decades have marched on, there also surface fond memories: the house you lived in ( or your parents or grand-parents lived in), the neighborhood cake shop where you spent an inordinate amount of time & pocket-money, the evenings spent strolling the streets girl-watching, those hot sizzling summers spent lazing with friends in the dark cool room & nights motorcycling to the street-side gol-gappe wala for several mouthfuls of that indescribable taste!!

The 1947 wiki is the place to go to, to share these & other stories. Think of this as your digital nukkad, a space to hang out, share your memories, write on behalf of family, & hopefully watch new connections take place as people from the other side of the border respond & reciprocate.

Tags: India, Pakistan, Social Software, 1947, digital commons, community

Laptops <$100 or cellphones: which is it to be

aarora — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 22:36:00 +0000

I came across an interesting twist to the long-brewing <$100-laptop-for-developing- countries scheme. It appears that Microsoft has better ideas, or so they think: internet-enabled cellphones for kids in these countries to get access to all the resources on the net. (See Technology Review).

Granted that cellphones are a known commodity in most parts of the world, & are largely outnumbering landlines in developing countries, but I think it needs to be remembered that cellphones are loved because they let you TALK, not because of cool videos you can see, or music you can listen to, or even text messaging. Repeated research is showing that a very large percentage of cellphone usage is about speech.

Secondly, how in the world is a kid to manage to surf efficiently given the size of that screen. I loath having to read the occasional text message I receive, and would absolutely balk at reading large chunks of text on that teeny screen. The MS folks need to understand that it takes more than slots for keyboards to make use of cellphones for extended surfing.

The third issue is of power to recharge the gadget; it appears the under-$100 will be designed with a hand-crank to recharge, which is a good idea in developing & under-developed countries. I can speak for India, where frequent power outages are the norm ( Delhi is a prime example) in large cities groaning under the weight of rapid growth; the rural areas are worse, with power available for just a few hours every day.

And of course, all of this rests on having access to internet connectivity in the first place; the very logic of the exercise gets defeated if children in these countries are unable to get onto the web. So given the unreliable power scene, & relatively thin telephone connections per capita in the rural areas, it must be wireless connectivity: how feasible is that?

Very important too is the argument from Seymour Papert against the cellphone idea: a lot of the power of computers derives not from passive consumption of all that is on offer on the web, but on enabling the younger generation to be active producers through writing their own softwares/ applications. This is virtually impossible with a cellphone.

There are a myriad other issues that go against both of these options: physical conditions such as dust, heat, improper storage ( remember, poor households do not have special tables to neatly house these machines), & how these will affect longevity. And of course paramount are the social, economic & psychological factors: how good will be the translation for all the excellent resources out there; also poverty takes on a completely different color in such countries: it is well-known that all hands, young & old, must be put to work to seek refuge from hunger for that day; putting a kid into school, even a free, municipal-run facility, is a luxury that such subsistence kind of living simply does not allow. There is an opportunity cost to schooling; in addition, an inescapable script that runs among the poor is 'What good will education do anyway?'. I know that in my country, the poor would pooh-pooh the idea of studying & getting an education. That sort of dreaming is better suited to the middle classes ( who may not benefit as much from this scheme, as most likely they already have access to computers & the internet). So as happens with mid-day meal schemes in poor societies, where kids are sent to school only to get a decent meal, I suspect this computers-for-all scheme may meet with the same fate. Let the kid get one, the family will sell it off to buy more meaningful & useful things for the family, or even to buy liquor for the father! Sadly, this is the reality in poor countries, & one hopes that the folks sitting in the pristine campuses at MIT & Microsoft, & debating do-good ideas at Davos have toured the places that they hope to bring such change to. As always, here too it appears that the overwhelming logic is that if we can crack it technically / technologically, we have a winner. And how often, such a logic has met with failure!

On a related note, we met with clients of ours who are in the business of asset recovery for major companies in the US: they take charge of discarded computers from these users, shred the equipment of all that is recoverable, then reuse & reassemble these to ship off to developing countries. In fact, several NGOs & charities are into making these recycled systems available to countries in Africa & Asia. I wonder how this will play against the much-touted under-$100 laptop venture. Of course, with these recycled machines, the other issues remain as confounding: power availability, internet connections, & the socio-economic variables. But hardware to hardware, it seems the world's resources might be better spent resurrecting old hardware rather than creating it anew.

NYC and the strike

aarora — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 13:39:00 +0000

When one first heard about the possibility of a strike by the MTA workers, one was incredulous: do these things really happen in America? One heard of strikes in Russia or China or India, but here in America, that too in New York!! On second thoughts, it's not hard to see why not: despite the glitz & glamor of the American life, it is a harsh one. To my mind, America is a hugely 'masculine' country, borrowing Geert Hofstede's term, and New York might top the rankings!! I often wonder while walking down the streets of New York whether it is the size of the city that makes its people, its systems a little harder every day. Hotel staff do not feel it necessary to greet their clients courteously, or to settle them comfortably in their rooms; people plant themselves in the middle of sidewalks, chatting blissfully about this and that, their dogs staking a claim to even more of the space, stretching their leashes to check out the smells around the tree at the edge; and so what do other passers-by do? Well, they squeeze their way around this merry group, & move on as best they can. It is New York-ish to be unmindful of others in a public place, it is New York-ish to do exactly what you want to do & how you want to do it, the rest of the swirl of humanity will take care of themselves. ( A little side note: how do you distinguish a New Yorker from anyone else: well, if they make way for you on crowded subway stairs, or on a narrow street, 9 out of 10 times they are a not New Yorkers! A couple of bewildering hard knocks, and they'll gradually start to develop the mannerisms & behavior of a local!

And therefore it comes as no surprise to see the acrid & cacophonous exchanges between the union leader & the mayor on public television. Between strident accusations thrown at each other, with the already-suffering public caught in the middle: the union leader reminds us, the viewers, of how they are a hard-working simple folk working relentlessly in the service of the city; & the mayor wants to make sure you, the viewer knows that he walks across the Brooklyn Bridge to work every day, and the news network provides you a glimpse of his sleeping place at his emergency office: a pillow thrown on a carpeted floor.
And so the media war plays on, in true New York-style: grim looks, harsher speeches!

I personally am not affected too much by the strike, but on the first day of the strike, I walked through the East Village on my way to NYU. The downed shutters of store after store on that normally very-alive street were a total surprise. The immediate parallel my mind drew was to the times when Hindu-Muslim riots broke out in my city of Ahmedabad; the eerie calm in the normally throbbing, pulsating markets was jolting, more so because the fear of more violence was very real. The NY experience was more like watching a city, or a part of it, napping, taking a much needed breather. It seemed to me like the city that never sleeps was finally putting its feet up, snatching some rest, however fitful.

It was also interesting to see people waving down already occupied cabs, to see if their paths & destinations crossed enough to share the car with a couple of perfect strangers. The traffic on most streets was thinner, but it was a glorious day: chilly but sunny, and I enjoyed my stroll along Fifth Avenue, as did dozens of others who were leisurely moving about. I love that about New York, there is always, but always, people-movement on the streets.

The medium is the code

aarora — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 12:16:00 +0000

So these last few days, I have been diving deeper into code of all kinds: javascript, actionscript, css; and as I work, really work with the finer aspects of it all, as I understand the idiosyncracies & beauties of each, (yeah, clean, clear code is as beautiful as a well-crafted essay; reminds me of my son who is forever talking about the 'elegance' in math equations) I am transported back to the time when I created in paint. The oil paints, the oil,& turpentine, & one's ideas & sketches had to be molded & coaxed into a unified piece. It's the same with code: the essence of it still remains the same: become one with the medium in order to work well with it. And of course it's gratifying that one's efforts in the code medium can be easily made accessible to millions of users. And the way the web & RIAs are going, it is exhilarating to conjure up new possibilities for new experiences, new behaviours, & not least, rich graphics. I was pleasantly surprised to see the very attractive Konfabulator website. In terms of visual look, it is luscious; so are some of the widgets. The weather widget especially comes to mind, with the super icons for rain & clouds & sunshine..

Living here in the US the past couple of years has impressed upon me the wisdom of looking up the weather report for the day: I can't tell you how many times I have gotten drenched, or stepped out in a light shirt to realize that it's freezing. ( Never, ever did I check the weather back home in India, & I'm sure weather news & widgets are not as big a deal in Asia as they are in the West, probably because the weather there is not quite as temperamental as here). So I check out the weather widget, a very very attractive visual overview of the next few days ( though the default it turns up is for Palo Alto!!), showing thick gray clouds one day, fat droplets of rain for the next, & the sun peeking out shyly from behind the clouds the next. In school ( 4th grade or standard as we used to call it), we were given a homework assignment to fill in a paper calendar with a visual for the weather then; I used to get immense pleasure coloring these in with my boxful of pencil crayons. These widgets remind me of then.

Email health woes, mobile phones & other stories..

aarora — Mon, 17 Oct 2005 14:00:00 +0000

So while I labor on with my pet project about email visualization, I am fascinated by these stories I read up on the side when I am re-charging my batteries :)

Couch potatoes are bad enough, now people are carrying forward that behaviour to their office chairs too: experts warn of health risks from sedentary behaviours spawned by email; more & more people resort to emailing a colleague, ( even one sitting in the next cubicle!!) rather than walking over. Experts call it the 'Screen Slave' culture... Read it here
A teenager in the UK is being treated for 'text message addiction' as he runs up a 4500 (UK pounds!!) bill for text messaging in one year. He was sending 700 text messages a month, sent 8000 emails during one month... Read it here

Tags: Email, mobile phones, Health