September 2005 Archives

People living in Developing countries like India look towards America and the west for inspiration, for the work of people who make it a developed nation.

But recent exposures in the media of the insides of the American life in the aftermath of the hurricanes, suggest differently. Also, The way the media shows-some, hides-some, and diverts-some news, probably to avoid exposure of bad things that everyone thought only happened in under-developed countries, are exposing the stability of the American life.

What I am talking about here is, the following news items read since 9/11...

Item 1:

Wal-Mart store near downtown New Orleans on Friday, Sept. 16, 2005 suffered significant looting after Hurricane Katrina which will delay its reopening.

Item 2:

Two hurricanes have now hit Louisiana, wreaking terrible destruction. New Orleans continues to flood. Hundreds of thousands of people are scattered across the country, many in shelters. Given the scale of the calamity, surely it's time for Louisiana politicians to stop, assess the damage and work out the most rational way to help their state recover. Surely this is not the time for the government to write blank checks, for legislators to get greedy about unnecessary canals in their districts, or for federal agencies to launch projects that make future flooding more likely. Surely this is the time to spend money wisely. Right?

Wrong -- and if you thought otherwise, then you, like me, are still learning how deeply corrupt America's legislative branch has become.

Read more on this: Washington Post

Item 3:

American Red Cross gets signed agreements from Katrina victims who are given financial aid. As per the agreements the victims have to return every penny that is being given to them. Having disturbed heavily by the storms, katrina victims now also get into a debt unavoidably.

.. Meanwhile people wonder 'Where is all the money received as donations Going!'

.. Multi billion dollar greed by the Red Cross

Item 4:

A former Red Cross official who admitted embezzling thousands of dollars from the donations given for the victims of 911. Federal Prosecutors got convictions for four felonies. "While serving as executive director of the Western Upper Peninsula Chapter of the Red Cross in 2001- 02, She used Red Cross money for personal things and submitted false financial reports to national and regional offices. Some of the money she took was from the "liberty fund" set up for the terrorism victims"

[Note: Some of these newsitems are old and some are new.. they are shown above in newest first order]

Is America really what we think..??
Have you come across looting from shops by people during a calamity in your country??

You discuss!!

Below are some news links trying to slightly highlight the reality of corruption in America.. Notice that below links are not from BBC or CNN (I wonder why are big news agencies quiet on these things.)

Related News Links:
Salt lake tribune : After the hurricanes, the stench of government corruption lingers
The American Daily : Louisiana Corruption = Big Mess
Salon News: After the deluge, what next?
nashua telegraph: Corruption moving into hurricane zones
The Observer: Bush plea for cash to rebuild Iraq raises $600 -Just 600 Find out why

Yahoo has posted an exciting page on Internet since 1995 to 2005.
http://birthday.yahoo.com/netrospective/

Internet lovers dont miss this.
They have put in a nice concept and made the whole stuff of events from 95 to 2005 in ONE single page.. Accidentally jumped on this page.. and learned a lot of things I didn't know happened on the internet.

Weather has been challenging in America. Then Katrina... Now Rita. Its not uncommon about hurricanes in tropical regions of the world.. but these have been very strong and proved too much to handle in a short period.

May we hope americans face it strong and come out of this period, stronger.

Meanwhile, we should see the climatic conditions that has been deteriorating over the years, which has put pressure on many parts of the world in different ways, with katrina and rita for the americans.

In India here, we have had unusual rains earlier in mumbai, and now in Andra pradesh. The earlier rains in Mumbai, almost stopped life there. People are still evaluating cost of damages caused.

Hope all protocols like kyoto protocol, and other climate control protocols are actively considered and followed in the future, to control the changes we have caused to our atmosphere by polluting it.

All these things repeatedly remind me of all those movies I have seen, and books I have read about doomsday.. (may be i am over worried).

But, looking at things, I am really shocked. Its very true, that "When Nature questions the mistakes we do, nobody answers."

Today's newspaper revoked a long-time frustration of mine about Indian talent.

It was a column 'sound-off' in 'The Hindu' metroPlus.

Every other man outside India wonders, Why is India always developing, developing and only developing.. It has everything needed for growing into a blockbuster country of the time.
It has huge human resources, it has considerable natural resources, it has people with huge money (Vijay mallya for an instance)... It also has the most important thing, the FIRE in the minds of people to take the country to great heights.. But why does it ever grow so... so.. slow. Did India get very serious about the tortoise story or something!

In my opinion:
Indian parents have the key to unlock India!

Parent in India, show achievers to children when they grow. But when their child wants to take up something other than the usual (doing engineering and getting into a high-paying software job) they object.. they discourage.. they start quoting family troubles they had to face to raise the family.

Parents achieve success at forcing the child to do engineering, .. forcing again to do software... forcing into marriage to a distant relative's son/daughter because some astrologer said they will make a great couple.

The reason: This is what their parents did to them.. and they dont want to try something other than activating the same process, even if they understand its not favoring their child's interests.

Its more like a process in any child's life in India. Children and their talents remain behind the parents and their process. This way they say they are keeping traditions, culture, discipline, and why not may be they will even say 'keeping democracy'.

Some children walk-out of this process..

Take any famous businessman in India, there's 80% chance that you will learn he ran off from home to make it.

Take any famous business-woman in India, there's 80% chance that she grew up from one job to another taking 20 years or so to become a senior manager... and there will be a few woman who were the daughter of a businessmen discussed above.

While some children fight the process and even convince parents to think different, most children (almost 70%) give-up fighting and accept the process.

That's not all..

As per the process, the child is more so released from the process after his/her marriage (since Indian parents consider that their committments now gets over with the marriage).

But by time a man/woman get married its too late for thinking achievement from the beginning..
or again,
They are into another process where one has to convince spouse, in-laws, taking their time with work and running a family.

With no more fuel left to make to their aspirations, many take to a new process with their children (like their parents did with them).

Hope is with new generation parents who seem to understand the problems.. and probably live out of... The Process.

If you answered NO, there's 90% probablity you passed the test many times unknowing its name so far.

If you surf the web very too often, or have an email ID with yahoo or if you have typed comments on friend's blogs.. you would have probably passed a test called the 'CAPTCHA Test'

One basic form of the test is nothing but simple text coded inside a graphic image which the website's form asks you to visually see and type into a form textbox for validating that you are not a spam robotic program and that your form submission may be accepted.

I thought it was a freaky, sudden, idea of some webForm developer from the other portion of the world where I don't live.

I found about the inventors of this idea from dotnet247.com
dotnet247.com in itself is a popular website conceptualised on a simple idea of providing web interface for microsoft news posts. Unlike other websites which just implement the test with a graphic, this website has a credit link to CAPTCHA website.

The CAPTCHA test as per the website has many forms other than the common form generating text interlaced into an image (this is called gimp). There are tests which show four blocks in a pattern and you select one which doesnt seem part of the pattern, which is something very difficult to code as logic in computers and so only humans can answer.

The CAPTCHA Project is a project of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and they did this for Yahoo which was then much bugged with spam robot programs generating and submitting lot of forms for email creation.

Is it that the CAPTCHA cannot be broken by computer programs?
The website says,
"Greg Mori and Jitendra Malik of the University of California at Berkeley have written a program that can solve ez-gimpy(one test of CAPTCHA) with accuracy 83%. Thayananthan, Stenger, Torr, and Cipolla of the Cambridge vision group have written a program that can achieve 93% correct recognition rate against ez-gimpy, and Malik and Mori have matched their accuracy. Their programs represent siginifcant advancements to the field of computer vision."

" ... field of computer vision."
Hey! are they meaning computer 'eyes' kind of stuff. Cool! What do you think?

Read more at the CAPTCHA website, and learn about other interesting projects at Carnegie mellon like the 'Peekaboom!'

Link: The CAPTCHA Project

Looks like people are bored of reading content online.. given that almost all businesses have entered into online modes parallel to their offline businesses. Be it reading News, or, looking for a map of Chicago, or, reading a friend's thoughts... its all text, text, text now.

Everything in life all of a sudden started becoming Text, adding up to the already busy SMS messaging mediums.

No, Its not unfortunate. People like doing up things online, because, being online is easier and even costs less money (but more time, looks like nobody bothers about this very often.)

So, its now obvious that there should be businesses which provide services that can talk-enable a website.. for a real low price. Yes, they are there...but even more popular in recent years.

And you say, "What's so inventive about this.. I have seen some talking characters on sites even in 1999". Yes! but back in 1999 or till last couple of years how many people did you know use this for business, or how often have you heard some business say it improved sales 10% because of the talking characters?

That's what is happened in the past couple of years and now!

One such service called 'SitePal' of oddcast Inc has expressed its case study that it can improve your business considerably with very little costs. Check up their case study

Oddcast claims it has got more than 3000 customers for the service, serving around 65 million characters every month.

Yes! that number is the News. I believe it was never this popular until recently.

While a lot of news has been already talked-off of the opportunities virtual talking characters open-up for online marketers, many people have been campaigning for years for the idea of implementing virtual characters to bring near-to-real study environment for online distance learning programs.

In my opinion:
Talking on your websites definitely makes people know about you or your work easier than reading those numerous pages. And a plain end-to-end graphical demo would be nice but it wont be as effective as these talking characters because people start feeling you make the demo presentation with an eye of marketing alone, whereas these talking characters dont open a new demo page, and just talk the content that actually relates to what is there on the website of your business.

Sideline: I am not setting this up on this webpage.. huh! I know you really love and enjoy reading my content! Lets keep it that way ;o)

Do you have a website of your own?

Ah! never mind whether you have or not.. the Empire State Building(ESB) in New York has! Its not a normal sell lease space website though around 20% of the website does that.

The website is about the building itself, and what it means to the city New York.

esbnyc.com is the web address. The website gives you access to even view images of new york captured by webcams on top of the tower.

This is one of those highly inspiring buildings in new york other than the late WTC. I don't want to get into writing about WTC... it was like killing two tall handsome guys... were two of those who inspired New York for what it has become - The business capital.

Coming back to ESB, Why does it inspire?
Its in essence a warrior building I would say, which was built to guard the surroundings from lightning strikes. And is architected like a warrior in its strength as a building and as a commercial space.

Why is it a warrior?... because this tower acts as a huge lightning rod in the area attracting lightning to it and grounding the current. If that is not too much physics for you, please continue reading my entire post on this here...[Lightning and Empire state building]

Pics of Empire State building: (1)Top View (2)Lightning strike

[Tip: Do you know any other buildings that have websites? Add to the comments!]

Monday's newspaper in India says Prime minister has called on a meeting to discuss rising oil prices around the world.. and Indians can expect a price hike because of this on Tuesday.

Firstly, Great News! Bravo. No matter whether we catch up with the foreign economy or not, we have to definitely catch up with this the oil price hike.. So finally we got something we can say proudly, we are in pace with developments in the world.

Why does oil price get hiked?
Technically, Demand increases prices.

So, if some somebody is ready to buy oil in the market at a higher price why not sell it to him. And if anyone else wants oil obviously they have to pay what he pays or more than that.
So, when America had a hurricane and some of its oil refineries and oil production got damaged, American companies selling oil have increased demand, and by nature they have to pay more to buy more oil which otherwise is being bought by someone else at normal price.

But Politically, Favourable reasons for the oil Markets.. increases prices.

The oil stock dealers (especially in dominating countries) always wait for a reason to increase prices of oil stock. When they get one, they increase demand and prices, sell the oil stocks that they own for higher prices.

These dealers dont bother about overall consequences it has, against the short-term gain they make. They ofcourse make HUGE gains. OIL stock is the most hot stock.

Actually, this happens with any stock in the market, foreign currency demand increases the currency's value (also has a political reason), but with oil stock the effect reverberates and stock price increases multifold because more dealers start doing it in succession.

Solution: There should be very stricter and stringent norms in markets for trading on natural wealth related stocks. There should be a stringent measure that not all dealers get into the act and only the needy do it on a temporary huge increase in demand... and later settle up the prices back to normal once the demand drop to normal in the region.

What do you say? Add your comments through comment link

---Update 8 Sep 05
Hey, Heard this News? - Malaysia will not raise fuel prices again until the end of 2005.

Looks like Malaysian government is taking the hike in its cost subsidising fuel. Bold decision huh! Totally unpolitical and people friendly.

Malaysian government stands apart... while all governments decide to push the burden to consumer, and sell national fuel reserves at higher prices and cash-in on gains.

----Update Sep 9 2005
Global corporation OPEC used to monitor oil prices and try control it every time it rose, by increasing output to meet increased demands, from some gulf country.

I believe they are doing it still...but for some strange reason there seems to be a coordination of allowing the prices to rise for a few months to make money, and then bring it back to lower prices (which still will be higher than normal prices that existed).

Statement by OPEC Conference President on the recent
rising trend in oil prices

Do you have a digital camera?

The BBC is conducting this photo competition through its website bbcnews.com as part of its News 'In Pictures' category.

Contest Website: Photographer of the year 2005

Below is the information on the contest:

DEADLINE: THEMES
CLOSED - My family & friends
CLOSED - Fashion
5 September - Power
19 September - Work
3 October - Environment
17 October - Spaces
1 November - Final vote

Why Digital camera?
Submissions must be in digital form, and sent as an email. Visit contest page for more.

By the way, Last year's winning entry:
WINNER: Veronica Carter

News source and image copyrights : news.bbc.co.uk

Is there a solution to this game?

Do you read the instructions in the image.. The game is straight forward. The boat can have only 2 people at a time, and it requires atleast one person to paddle the boat.

I would appreciate if you know this and can tell me how this is done. I am wondering how from yesterday.

If you would be interested in the game file,
Download game from below link to play (requires Macromedia flash player to run. Try opening, you might already have flash player).

Download file (Mind.zip-383kb) Once downloaded, extract and play.

Hey, download, check for viruses and then use. If you dont have antivirus safely dont even download it..

Click on image to view 1024x768 sized hi-res picture

Posted to following Technorati tags:
India, Taj Mahal, Seven wonders of the world

Natural disasters disturb!

Recent news on hurricane katrina flooding and devastating good old cities in United States, is disturbing. And people are saying, its just started and that katrina is technically looking like it will ruin more.

Image in below link shows expected path of katrina, and that means more damages.
Tracking katrina

Donate through RedCross! http://www.redcross.org/donate/donate.html

News links:
Hurricane Katrina aftermath: Hundreds feared dead along US Gulf Coast
'Our tsunami,' Mississippi hurricane survivors say
Katrina’s heavy hit being felt in South

New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina

Its raining heavy here in Chennai, India.. for the past 3 days.. raining with lightning and all. (Note: By heavy, I dont mean we are flooded.)

On seeing lightning, I recollected a lot I learnt about it, and how I miss learning more on electricity rather than rubbing with code in my software job. huh! It always happens.. lets move on.

What's a Lightning?
Lightning has always fascinated me like it has with many people. When you learn about it you start understanding the beauty of it...'the technology'. First myth that I lost, about 8-10 years ago learning about it was, 'Lightning is not just light formed by rains'.

And whenever lightning comes to the mind, I remember the tower Empire State building. Yes, its more a tower than a building... probably some still refer to it as a 'building' because it has that word in its name 'Empire state building'.

To understand what this tower's architecture does to lightnings, we will first study what a lightning is!

Lightning is a huge very-very-high-voltage spark that runs down shunting/short-circuiting the electric gap between the charged clouds and the ground/Earth terminal. And when you read about this, you start trying your own theories about Earth and why its always considered neutral and an absorbant for electric current. We will hit that in another posting.

How does Lightning happen?
The charged clouds, as they move, establish a voltage between the two terminals Earth and the Clouds. Charged particles always look for a closed loop to flow. But never do we have a huge thick copper wire connecting clouds to the earth.. So the gap becomes a dielectric medium made of Air which has a breakdown voltage.. Every gap has its own breakdown voltage beyond which current just jumps the gap. The smaller the gap, the lower the breakdown voltage.

Suppose charged clouds move over a portion of ground, which, say, doesn't have any buildings or anything except for a tree. And say, it's raining. Getting wet in the rain the tree attains some amount of electrical conductivity. When the cloud comes just over this tree the active gap between the cloud and a conductive object decreases. Now the tree becomes the terminal instead of the Earth. At this stage, if the cloud has enough charge that the voltage between the cloud and the tree is higher than the breakdown of the dielectric gap formed inbetween them, then the current jumps the gap damaging the dielectric gap and the other terminal 'tree' momentarily. The damage could split the tree, or burn the tree, or just leave some parts of the tree dead, depending on the amount of current that jumps to the ground flowing through the tree.

Ok, if its a spark it should be yellowish.. how white?
Yes, you would have seen sparks at home while using a switch or sometimes short-circuiting two terminals. Any spark has all the constituents of a fire. For now, without getting into details of sparks, we would go to the easier definition that lightning is a spark created due to very-very high voltage of the order of several thousands of volts.. and so its whitish rather than the sparks at home which are formed by 110 or 240 volts.

Lightning Arresters
Now, lets come to the idea of a lightning arrester. A lightning arrester is a perfectly conductive rod kept on top of buildings and connected deep into the ground through thick copper strips. The idea is, "No don't flow through my building, flow through this rod and the copper strips to the ground." Thus, preventing damage to the building.

The Empire State Building's lightning arrester architecture
Yes, The empire state building has lightning arrester in its architecture.. No, No its not just a rod fixed to the top of the tower.. the tower center pole itself is the arrester.

A very thick conductive rod runs through the center of the tower deep into the ground also being part of the foundation of the tower. This rod extends high out of the tower to make the top of the tower as in the picture.

Every year the empire state building captures 100's of lightnings or rather discharged 100's of highly charged clouds protecting the surrounding from possible lightning damage. The conductive rod is thick enough to allow very huge currents to flow through it to the ground without any damage to the building or the rod.

Records say that the Empire state building was constructed by a person, a depression patient, to overcome his depressive thoughts, and hence the building's majestic architecture. The building gave him the strength to overcome depression and live happy.

Does lightning always happen only between clouds and the ground?
No, most of the time lightning happens between clouds itself. That's why you see light strikes within the clouds. Two clouds oppositely charged get discharged by a spark when they move closer to one another.

In my opinion: If there's a lot of charge in the clouds, can we absorb it, store it and use the current for a longer period?
Yea! A lot of texts mostly at schools describe lightning as a spark which has enough voltage to power 200 homes for a year. Its more easier definition, but technically its not as its said.

Lightning does involve a lot of high-voltage. But, it would not be technically possible to absorb the charge. We cannot absorb charge from a lightning and store it.. because lightning is firstly a 'Discharge', so the charges no longer exist. Probably you could create new charges in a lab taking the current from a lightning. People are working on this and many possibilities. But it isn't going to be possible until we discover/invent more technologies.

Also, there may be a way if we try go to the clouds and absorb the ions through some means before the discharge.

But before everything, how do we store it?
It would be very complex or no technology exists as of today to hold charges stable for any amount of time (Take our batteries, they run out slowly and gradually even if you dont use them). We have technology which can store the charge and discharge gradually over a period of time. And this too, we don't have the capability yet to store so much charge as to power 200 houses or anything.

We feed any electricity generated through means and ways into the power grid, so that someone who is in need of power can use it, or the main power generation units which power the grid can reduce capacity or one or two of them can be off.

There are lot of questions that come up..
How are clouds charged?
How do batteries work?
Can lightning strike an airplane?
How is power generated?
Whats a power grid?
...
...etc.,

Thats' the beauty I was mentioning.. start exploring!!

Have a great day!
'Harish