Thought Garage

It feels like forever, but I am glad to be back. It's been little more than six years since I wrote my last post on this particular blog. While I wrote a few posts afterwards on LinkedIn, Wordpress and Medium, I have been largely absent from blogging.  Lots of things have changed since then. The world order as we know doesn't exist any more. And silence isn't an option anymore. I have been thinking about coming back to traditional blogging for a while for variety of reasons, but couldn't make it happen.  Finally, Today is the day I will start over.

This is yet another example of NDTV.com’s sensationalism twisted titles. The title says, as if this was a fact, woman made to urinate in public. In fact, this was just an allegation by a lawyer. If NDTV.com to demonstrate any integrity, should have included the word ‘alleged’ or ‘charged’ or similar words to indicate that this wasn’t a fact, but an allegation by a lawyer. That would have changed the entire tone of the article. The problem is that everywhere the page is referred on social networks and elsewhere, it is the title that will be quoted and repeated. Not many people may even read the whole story.  Being very active on social networks, NDTV know that quite well. So NDTV.com scored a perfect sensational story, with its choice of words in the title. Source: NDTV.com At that time, there was nothing confirming that it actually happened. No video footage or any of those women directly made that allegation on videos.

This was the first time, I got confused and started questioning NDTV.com’s sensationalism agenda behind twisting titles of their news stories. This was on the day Delhi Assembly election results were announced. The NDTV.com story title said : “Assembly election 2013: have learnt from Aam Aadmi Party, says Rahul Gandhi”.   However, content later in the article says it differently : "The Aam Aadmi Party involved a lot of non-traditional people and we will learn from that ...and will better it in a way you cannot imagine," Mr Gandhi said I have watched the video multiple times, just to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. Here is the actual choice of words Rahul Gandhi used. [04:07] “I think, I think the Aam Admi Party has involved a lot of people, who the traditional parties did not involve. We are going to learn from that and we are going to do a better job than anybody in the country and involve people in ways that you can not even imagine right now.”  Source :...

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have recently spotted quite a few ‘sensationalism’ twists to news stories on NDTV.com.  This is yet another one, in this case, a misleading title, by deliberate omission of words that would have actually put the whole title in a positive tone for Arvind Kejriwal. The article quotes a news paper quoting, “The News daily reported: "India's new shooting star with dreams of another 'India Shining' appeared as the country's most unimpressive politicians but with a most impressive agenda. " It conveniently ignored the second part of the sentence, “most impressive agenda” which would have given a completely different kind of meaning and context to the whole sentence and would have put the same politician on a positive note.  Again, it sure look to me like deliberate sensationalism twist, this case also a biased view rather than anything. Isn’t it? Source: NDTV.com

I have recently spotted quite a few places where NDTV title doesn’t exactly say the same as the details in the article says. Lost in translation? or just plain twisting for journalistic sensationalism? Title says “' AAP doesn't treat women as humans ,' says founder member Madhu Bhaduri as she quits”, but the quote in details says, slightly differently: “In this party, women are not considered humans” (see the text highlighted). Source : NDTV.com You may say, they effectually mean the same thing. Is it? Even if they mean the same,  Why not use the same exact phrase in both places?

Wow!!! Mangalyaan, the spacecraft on a voyage to Mars has been successfully blasted off.  Superb.  Hoping to see spectacular and ground breaking results from the ISRO’s Mars Orbiter Mission .  Pictures from ISRO

How long will it take to multiply these two numbers ? 7,686,369,774,870 × 2,465,099,745,779 It just took 28 seconds for Shakuntala Devi and earned her a record in the Guinness Book Of Records.  A child prodigy with unbelievable power to calculate will remain an inspiration to so many.  She died earlier this year. Google’s doodle today honors Shakuntala Devi , known to the world as the ‘Human Computer’, on her 84th birthday. RIP.

Mangalyaan, the aptly named spacecraft will take off on Tuesday on a 11 month voyage to Mars, from Sriharikota. No matter what happens tomorrow, it will remain a big day for India. Image Source : BBC Hope and wish for a very successful launch and fruitful voyage.

Latest news reports confirm that Infosys has reached a settlement to pay $34 million in fines for visa fraud, for bringing in developers on B1 visas to work and other irregularities in keeping accurate I-9s.

If you already have Vonage or planning on signing up, you may be better off dumping it as there are now much better alternatives. Read on. Vonage was touted as a pioneer for commercial VOIP phone service back in 2005 when I first signed up for the service.  The excitement of a killer and industry disrupting VOIP service evaporated very soon. The  quality never measured up to the ‘carrier’ quality. I disconnected in a couple of months due to voice quality issues. And what happened when I tried to disconnect was yet another totally frustrating customer service story, “ Vonage – expecting good customer service is stupid ”. When Vonage announced unlimited international calling to India (and few other select countries), I hesitated due to my earlier experience. A few months later, we needed a landline phone and I did little research to shop for a better one. At that time, Vonage proved to be a better option for a landline phone that would also double to be able to call anybody in...

By all measures, the rise of China as one of the leading global economic power houses of the world is a great success story.  And by all estimates, China will become the largest economy sooner than the rest of the world is comfortable accepting it. So, isn’t China, then officially the largest living success stories of communism? Watch this great TED talk by Eric Li, a venture capitalist, I bet,  your understanding of China will never be the same. And so does your understanding of efficacy of democracy. Eric X. Li : A tale of two political systems I can’t resist the temptation of comparing the largest living democracy, India,  with tens of parties at the helm and the largest living communist country, China, and for all practical purposes a dual party system in the US and its current political gridlock, only to realize that the point Eric Li made is quite reverberating. Unfortunately, while China can easily replicate the best of the rest of the world in terms of  ...

I am not a big fan of Upma. Never really liked it so much, though I eat when I have to. But somehow my 3 year old loves it. If you ask what she prefer for a breakfast on the bed, she always says Upma. And it goes without saying, she gets it. So today is one of those days. It’s the second time I prepared it in the last few days, and oh boy! I nailed it today. It was awesome. Even I really liked it myself and my daughter loved it so much she comeback for seconds. Yahoooooo !! While preparing I was wondering, what most people that cook in the family go through , to prepare something that you don’t necessarily like, but you do it anyways because others love it.  Hats off to you all.    Am I getting my first lesson in what matters when you care? Hmm, that may sound little heavy on the breakfast table, but I guess I made my point.  Have a nice day.

Beautiful sight of Godavari rail road brdige. via 92229232@N02@Flickr

When you are writing software, you always get a second chance. In fact, lots of chances to get it correct. You have compiler warnings, failed test cases and some times crashes alert you that something is not right and will give you a chance to correct. And you get literally unlimited chances to apply those corrections.  Well, cooking looks to be totally unforgiving in this respect and on any given day, you may get just one chance to get it right. If you fail, you fail. Try again right away if you have patience of starting it all over. Or start over some time later or next day. But not much of a second chance to correct a mistake.  More ruthless, when it comes to salt. If you put just a little more, even a tiny little more, it never hesitate to show what it got. Totally ruthless. End result will be a failed dish that no one will be able (and/or happy) to eat. And most dishes, you may not be able to add something little more to offset it. Little trick I learned the ha...

What happened to Microsoft’s usability team? The color choices, particularly the single glaring white background everywhere make it appear as one giant screen instead of meaningful sections on the screen. Why dumb down so much in terms of user experience? No more round edges, gradients, shadows, contrasting backgrounds or easy on eyes highlighting.  I am not a designer, but I see an UI element communicate by its color, shape, position, contrast, focus and of course text. The new UI in 2013 definitely eliminated some of those attributes for some elements. Word 2010 vs. Word 2013 So far, the only big difference I see is the integration of SkyDrive so that documents can be readily saved in to the cloud and retrieved any where.  At another level, going towards subscriptions could be a game changer for Microsoft. But when it comes to the UI, I find it boring and am little disappointed.

Black Friday deals began at SAMs club online at 10 PM central and the website is already down within 20 minutes. Heard about cloud computing ?

Scoring a zero will still entitle you to get an Engineering seat, with fees fully paid by the government, in Andhra Pradesh, India. If you belong to a certain caste group. (SC/ST) Hmm! In Andhra Pradesh, you can get zero in an entrance exam, but still get a place in the state's engineering colleges in the reserved quota.

Its a love affair. I guess its fair to call it a love affair. Unreasonable. Blind. And mad. "No gold, no wedding," is a saying in India, indicating the importance of gold to Indian culture and tradition. Byron Pitts reports on India's obsession with gold.

Wonderful video. I knew the principle of multiplication of probability for repeated occurrences. But when looking at this specific example, it struck to me why the multiplication makes sense in the first place. LeBron James asks Sal Khan whether it is easier to make three free throws or one three pointer

Quite thrilled and optimistic about the possibilities of this show: Satyamev Jayate . Novel angle of commercial TV on social aspects. Its worth researching more on why and how those states that stay clear of the bloodbath of innocent and unborn girls at an alarming rate, while rest of the country is so full of it. from Satyamev Jayate inaugural episode