The Data Cruncher

For the last few months I must have crunched a lot of data in the computing machine. My clan memebers will understand well when I mention something like a 100000 X 500 matrix of data etc, related to differnt characteristics; or the auction data set of around 100000 auction transactions with their click stream data etc. Thanks to Econometrics, and recent tools.

CPU Frequency and Engineer's Comedy

Two articles from the recent issues of Spectrum attracted me.

Why CPU Frequency Stalled : Is something which I knew, but never explored beyond my general knowledge. The data presented provides the evidence of why we never see the CPUs beyond 2 GhZ. My eary years of career as a industrial design engineer to tacked the over heating issues of Supercomputers came to use. Still heating is an issue for servers and high performance computers. The ugly industrial air-conditioners and the air cutting noise due to them; is something which I could never tolerate. They ruin the meditating sernety of Supercomputers. Hopefully a day will come, there will be no need for them !!!

An engineer walks into a comedy club...: provided me some relief. If at all, amongst all the circumstances of life, there is no IT and no related business; perhaps I need to change my course in life. Well, my stretched acting career till high school and college days will come for a rescue. I never took that part of life forward. Neverthless, it is always true 'Inside every engineer, there lies an artist'. Bravo !! Corinna !! You are providing new lights .... I should store the jokes in my mailbox and practice my rhetoric delivery in front of mirror !!

- Near death experience of Outsourcing -

Outsourcing, offshoring ...yes, the discussions and my delibeartions for last couple of weeks are on this issue.

It starts from Prof. Anand Gopal to the recent article by Sramana Mitra. Her article, although well poised, but does not bring my senses into agreement, and I find the article biased. My disagreement starts from :

“India's $30 billion IT/ITES services industry, meanwhile, is slowly and surely losing its competitive advantage. They are complacent. They will not take risks. They have "outsourced" thinking to their customers”.

With the prediction that Indian IT services and outsourcing sectors is going to touch more than US$100bn in few years, her arguments does not sound true. Interstingly before I even finish this write up in blog and think about it ratonaly, the counter argument is already been done by Philip J. Fersht.

Handhelds for Health

Interstingly the use of handheld and PDAs are growing dramatically. However, a gadget is better know by its use or reach to people. Rather than getting cosntrained by only use for calls or similar purposes, its reach to the rural and remote places has made cases for innovative use.

Amongst many initiatives, I found two very intersting. One is that of AED Satelling Health Information and Technology work : http://pda.healthnet.org/handheld-projects.html

The other is http://handheldsforhealth.org/ : started by Drs. Shashank and Isha Garg. I know them since the Simputer days and their dedication towards the cause is immense. Recently returned from Stanford, they are ambitious enough to utilize the handhelds in India for remote health monitoring purposes.

My center at University of Maryland : Center for Health Information and Decision Systems (CHIDS) has collaborated with Arogya Foundation of India for studying their voluntary health monitoring system. We plan to tie up with Handhelds for Health to improve the working pattern of the Arogya Sevikas. All goes well, it may improve in providing a decision support system for health in remote villages of India.

Microsoft offers to buy Yahoo

I just came across the news that Microsoft has offered to buy the search engine company Yahoo for $44.6bn (£22.4bn) in cash and shares. This was in the agenda in past few months, with the rise of Google. One point to note is that since both emerged, Google has been able to showcase itself as a software solution provider in many fields apart from its search engine. Even though Yahoo was started as a similar initiative, it did not keep up with the business story of Google.

Yahoo began in 1994 as a personal project by David Filo and Jerry Yang, electrical engineering students at Stanford University. Initially a simple list of interesting websites, Yahoo.com began to file these Internet links in topical categories as the list grew. Interest in Filo and Yang's list grew rapidly among their classmates, and word spread outside the university. The website was called "Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web," and it rapidly developed an international following. The site was later renamed Yahoo!, an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle," and in 1995 the organization attracted significant investment from the established US venture-capital firm, Sequoia Capital. The company grew quickly, going public with an Initial Public Offering (IPO) of shares in April of 1996. The initial share price was US$13, but as the boom in internet stocks took hold the price soared and reached a closing peak of US$475 per share in January 2000. A world-record share price was set later that year when a single share in Yahoo! Japan (a joint venture with a Japanese financial group) was worth over US$1.1 million. However since 2001, there has been rise and fall of its share preices, and recent months have seen more.

Still it Yahoo has continued acquiring companies to expand its range of services, particularly Web 2.0 services. Yahoo Launchcast became Yahoo Music in 2005, purchased photo sharing service Flickr and in 2007 had released new verstion of Yahoo Mail and Messenger, including the service users of Yahoo Messenger and Windows Live Messenger, to send free text messages to mobile phones in sveral countries.

2008 saw the downfall with announcement that Yahoo was planning to lay off 1000 of employees out of its work force of about 14,000. Employees are being invited to apply for an unknown number of new positions that are expected to open as the company expands areas that promise faster growth. However, with this current announcement of Microsoft tryingto buy Yahoo, this may be the end of another INTERNET GIANT !!!

Microsoft, Multicore, Parallel computing ...

Two things that caught my eye today; w.r.t microsoft.

1. Microsoft trying to make sense of multicore

and

2. Barcelona Supercomputing Center and Microsoft Create Joint Research Centre in Barcelona for Parallel Computing : Centre seeks solutions to challenges and opportunities coming with multi-core processors.

Few months before Supercomputing Expert Daniel Reed had joined Joins Microsoft Research
and there as an annoncement that Microsoft Research accelerates efforts in high-performance and multicore computing.

So where all these leading into? It seem with saturation and wonderfull penetration into the PC/desktop and consumer computing markets, Microsoft has been aiming to reorient the business strategy to bring the multicore and supecomputing domain to the consumer market. As such the early mover advantange will be beneficial to Microsoft; but subject to overcoming the barriers of technology.

No doubt, the era of Supercomputing and Parallel/High performance computing restricted in the scientific solutions/applications domain is going to end. There will more consumer-centric demand with the unfolding dynamics of business. Intersting times to see; and perhaps my dreams of "PARAM" (Indian Supercomputer) or a 20 GF Supercomputer on my desktop is not far off !!

My Research Base

This post is for myself, only myself...and if you chance upon..please do not hesitate to use it, but do send a mail for me to know. I love to be in touch ...

Some links are through library system of school/university and so may not work for you..

Journals I follow/intend to follow
American Economic Review
Econometrica
Economic Theory (description)
Games and Economic Behavior
Information Systems Research
International Economic Review
Journal of Applied Econometrics
JAIS
Journal of Consumer Research
Journal of Econometrics
Journal of Economic Literature
Journal of Economic Perspectives
Journal of Economic Theory
Journal of Economics and Business
Journal of Finance
Journal of Financial Research
Journal of Labor Economics
Journal of Management Information Systems
Journal of Marketing
Journal of Marketing Research
Journal of Political Economy
Management Science
Marketing Science (description)
MIS Quarterly
Quarterly Journal of Economics
Rand Journal of Economics (through ABI/INFORM)
Review of Economic Studies
Review of Economics and Statistics


Full Text Databases/ My tools to use when feeling low...
ABI / INFORM
Business Source Premier Academic Search Premier
IngentaComplete
JSTOR
Social Science Citation Index
Web of Science


Not in the above two categories..

AISWorld
Google Scholar
IDEAS
NBER Working Papers
Research Port
SSRN
VBIC
http://changingminds.org/index.htm
Org Theories : http://faculty.babson.edu/krollag/
http://informationr.net/ - research methods..

Conferences, deep holes in student pocket, but great learning opportunities..

WISE 2006
ICIS2006
CIST2006 papers
INFORMS Marketing Science Conference 2006

Selling Heat...

I came across this project to heat Stockholm Central Station using body heat. My background in designing thermal systems for PARAM Supercomputers and National Param Supercomputing Facility and the related research that time; led me to ponder on this new development.

The current upsurge in using computers and related IT products has given rise heat management issue. Use of computers per head has increased in the last few years tremendously. Data centers are huge glass house infrastructures; changing Weber's Iron Cage to Glass Cage.

The idea of selling this excess heat generated by systems to others for heating purpose is a good idea, at least to conserve energy. The shopping mall built in 2001 in an old Telegraph building in Norway.The designers of the new mall worked out a plan to connect their heat pump system to the data center of a near by Telco facility. During the Winter, the data center heats the mall, and during the cooling season, the mall uses the heat generated by the server room to preheat a local hotel's sanitary (showers, sinks) water system.What is interesting about this system, is not just the logical efficiency, but that the entity in the best position to profit is the mall that installed the heat pump and exchanger system that allows the system to operate; Selling Heat !!!

At least that leads me to believe that the glass cage is porous....

Portery for Pottery

Pottery : Art of Clay modeling

Portery : Study of the The Competitive Strategy in various versions ..

Well, I am not going to discuss about Pottery ...Nonetheless, India has been a master in pottery since ancient times, and the art is still practiced by the skilled community in different parts of India.

Portery - as per my definition, of studying Porter and his forces, competitive strategy etc; is very relevant now as Porter returns with his article 'The Five Competitive Forces That Shape Strategy'.

He acclaims a new version of his classic work of strategy formulation with the practice lens. Lately, he had brought economic rigor to the study of competitive strategy for corporations, regions, nations, and, more recently, health care and philanthropy. “Porter’s five forces” have shaped a generation of academic research and business practice.

Porter contends, if the competitive forces are intense, as they are in such industries as airlines, textiles, and hotels, almost no company earns attractive returns on investment. If the forces are benign, as they are in industries such as software, soft drinks, and toiletries, many companies are profitable. How else do we explain the fact that some fast-growth businesses, such as personal computers, have been among the least profitable industries in recent years. With competitive strategy, Porter extended the competitive forces analysis to the point of view of industry itself going beyond looking through the prism of markets or of organizational capabilities. Porters framework , after more than two decades since it got into mainstream thinking on competition and strategy.

Sometime back, Porter had given good comments and insights about strategy for India's competitiveness. He noted " it is too early for India to think that it had been successful, even partially." I agree with this fullest, and India has a long way to go...

Even encashing the art of Pottery with the leanings from Portery can be a challenging task to start with .......Which in my view to some extent, Chinese have done. USA shops are full with Chinese Cutleries, not Indian ones....

My Slogan for the day Portery for Pottery..!

WIKIA Search Launched

As Bill Gates was busy this week giving his talk at the Consumer Electronics Show 2008 at Las Vegas, showing the gadget that will collect all information about any object when it is pointed to that (like pointing to a theater will give all the information about the movies running etc. etc..); Jimmy Wales was preparing hard to launch Wikia Search. On its launching, he says "Search is part of the fundamental infrastructure of the Internet. And we are making it open source. Wikia Search will start to change search from being proprietary, top-down, and closed." The intitial reports of the launch has been eupherius in the Wikipedia Followers Community. Although there has been some nasty welcome remarks on it after the alpha release.

Wikia Search has two strikes against it, in a way: the first is that it wants to compete with Google, the $180-billion behemoth that pretty much owns the online search business. And the second is that Wikia Search comes from Jimmy Wales, with his fame as the founder of the "open source" encyclopedia known as Wikipedia. That's a pretty tough act to follow...

We will watch the unfolding of it in coming months; with perhaps the beta release coming soon. Nonetheless the claimed open platform with social networking features buit in will be intersting to use as an user.

Networks.. Networks.. Networks..

Sometime back Forbes had given a good cover story on Networks.

I quote from the article "Human networks are changing the character of the globe. By banding together, people are transforming the immigrant experience–and delivering support and charitable works in imaginative new ways"....

The genesis of networks was with the vision of chain of radio stations connected by WIRE and CHAINED like roads, canals and railways. The INFRASTRUCTURE view of networks is getting old faster than me at least. This is good....

Today NETWORK is my source to order books from Amazon ( Although I have visited Barnes and Noble couple of times in the last month, but did not buy) ...doing my research or as simple as talking to my friends over IP Phone. Markets are based on what I am going to buy, with Amazon giving me recommendations, or Netflix knowing what I like; even Safeway has a list of my most likelihood of weekly groceries. I did not meet Hillary and Obama personally, but did a good amount of research on their perspectives and policies in recent campaign; all through networks,

One way NETWORKS satisfy the human fundamental conditions of getting linked. Digital technology creates new pathways to link humans together separated by geography, economic status, ethnicity, religion or race. They Socialize us more, with creation of Social networks. Life is better connected...

Beyond the fundamental concepts, the multi scale-multifarious manifolds of NETWORKS lead towards the visions like e-Science and Cyberinfrastructures.

Searching, Tagging and Blogging

They are really three different things...

One thing is common amongst them; empowering lost users in the vast world of web for better, to the point information. Blogging does not necessary do the searching part, but if one is aware of the tools and technologies, he can synthesize well enough at one place. I try to do that, to some extent. Perhaps a best example will be http://whatis.techtarget.com/ with their efforts like this

It is beyond doubt that Google has given the Best Standard in Search. If Peter Norvig, Director of research at Google is to be believed, their efforts are on to make it more powerful with better tools in the hand of users. The huge market share of Google and the correlation with the potential towards evolving technolgies; supports Peter's vision. He points to the integration of our various technolgies with simplicity and good implementation plans.

At the same time the technolgies like "Tagging" is making the knowledge searchers intensly involved and organised in the search process. It provides best available way to get rid of information overload and end up spending significant time in information retrieval. Unless one is acquinted and use it in best ways, the results are not so easy to get. Del.icio.us is a good way to manage one's tags; and it is yet to be seen what happens after its Yahoo acquistion. Truely, a cognitive social taxonomy classification process of the Internet.

Wonderfull days ahead ...and technolgies in the hands of consumers to exploit its best....