17 May 2009
A lot has been written about Wolfram Alpha, most of it lavish praise. Today it seems to have gone live and I thought of testing a few queries which I also tested on Google.
I saw a reference to Nova Scotia and had some doubt whether it was in Canada or the USA. Google returned a few sites dealing with travel to Nova Scotia (Canada), a link to the Wikipedia entry on Nova Scotia etc.
Wolfram Alpha returned a detailed reference to Nova 1 (spacecraft) with its location at Scotia, New York, United States. It went on to give me detailed information about its altitude, instantaneous velocity, average velocity, average latitude, orbital period, inclination, orbit type etc which is of course not what I wanted.
It reminds me of the girl in the nursery rhyme. "When she was good she was very, very good. And when she was bad she was horrid."
That made me try out Mother Goose on Wolfram Alpha. Disappointingly it said: "Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input." It offered suggestions but again they were all far off the mark. Google got it right with the first entry. You don't even need to go to it. The excerpt says: "Mother Goose is a well-known figure in the literature of fairy tales and nursery rhymes."
Wolfram seems to be a bit like the I'm Feeling Lucky button on Google. If you know that what Google will return as the first entry is what you want you can click the I'm Feeling Lucky button but otherwise it's best to go the conventional way.
Category: Search-Engines
06 June 2008
Global capitalists in Kerala paying abnormally high wages
You've heard of capitalists exploiting workers by paying sub-subsistence wages. Now they've gotten more devious. They're exploiting workers by paying abnormally high wages. I kid you not. Here's an excerpt from The Hindu of 4 June 2008 published from Thiruvananthapuram.
"The high wages offered by contractors at the Smart City construction site in Kochi have begun to affect the coir industry in adjoining Alappuzha district," according to Minister for Coir G. Sudhakaran.
"If things are going to be like this, we may have to take up the issue with the Chief Minister," Mr Sudhakaran said at a workshop on the use of coir as a geo-textile here on Tuesday.
He said it was improper for the Smart City contractors to offer "abnormally high wages" at their work site. Many coir workers from Alappuzha were boarding the morning trains to Kochi, lured by the offer of up to Rs 400-a-day for manual labour.
He said there was a limit to what a traditional industry such as coir could offer as wages.
Workers, especially the youth, were leaving the coir industry.
He described the high wages offered in Kochi as "the trickery of international capital". For a period of time the international capital would buy labour at high rates, only to get rid of it later.
On returning home, the workers would find their traditional means of livelihood gone, he said.
The Minister said this was not the kind of development Kerala needed. New-age industries should come to the State providing jobs to the educated youth.
At the same time, growth in that sector should not destroy traditional sectors such as the coir indutry which sustained several lakhs of poor families in the State, he said.
Very interestingly, the paper's archives column "This Day That Age" carried this item, dated 4 June 1958:
Mr Mao Tse Tung, Chinese Communist head of state, in his first published pronouncement for a year, on June 1 praised the poverty of the Chinese people as an incentive to revolution. Mr Mao was writing in the first issue of Red Flag, the new fortnightly theoretical review of the Chinese Communist Party. He wrote: "This seems a bad thing but it is in fact a good thing. The poor people want a change, want to do things, want revolution." Mr Mao said that "the political consciousness of the masses is rising rapidly" and "never before have the masses been so spirited, with such high morale and so strongly determined." He added: "The decisive factor besides the leadership of the party is the 600 million people. The more people, the more views and suggestions, the more intense the fervour and greater the energy." The article, which bears the stamp of Mr Mao's classical literary style, is rich in metaphor.
Category: Communism
22 March 2008
Baba Amte: The youngest of the young
An article I wrote on Baba Amte has appeared in a recent issue of Tehelka.
Category: Miscellaneous
09 March 2008
Income Tax Officer Arrested in Nanda Case
Another day in the life of an income tax officer. From a PTI report.
Arms dealer Suresh Nanda, charged with receiving kickbacks in defence deals, his son and two others have been arrested by CBI for allegedly conspiring to fudge their account books seized by the IT department during a raid last year.
They were arrested in Mumbai on Saturday night by the investigative agency after registering a case against Nandas, Income Tax Deputy Director Ashutosh Verma and chartered accountant Bipin Shah, official sources said on Sunday.
Verma, an Indian Revenue Service officer of 1999 batch, is alleged to have helped the Nandas in fudging account books seized during a raid in February last year, they said.
Nanda's chartered accountant and the income tax officer were also accused of trying to manipulate IT orders in the favour of Nandas. The IT department had searched 20 premises of arms dealer Nanda, in Delhi and in Mumbai and claimed to have recovered cash worth several lakh of rupees and a large number of documents.
Damn surprised, aren't we?
Category: Income-Tax
07 February 2008
If you hitch one blind man to another, will they be able to figure out the way? Microsoft apparently believes they will. Or so it would seem from its unsolicited bid for Yahoo.
It's a strange belief. Anyone who does a fair bit of searching every day will know that neither Yahoo! nor Microsoft know much about search. Their skills in search are not complementary so it is not at all clear how buying Yahoo will help Microsoft at all.
If I were a Yahoo shareholder I would welcome the bid of course. My strategy would be to sell out for the combination of cash + Microsoft shares, and sell the Microsoft shares at the earliest opportunity. Its share price can only go down because the merger, if it goes through, could well be the biggest error in Microsoft's history. And the costliest too.
As a Yahoo employee, however, my strategy would be to forget about search and use Google as the default search engine on its site, which is of course what Yahoo was doing until February 2004, that is to say, just three years ago.
It might also not be a bad idea to use Google Adsense on all or most of Yahoo's pages, perhaps after wangling a deal so that Yahoo gets to keep 95% or so of the revenue. This is the right moment to push through such a deal because Google is anxious to keep Yahoo out of Microsoft's hands. But even here, Yahoo would need to reduce the clutter on its pages to give AdSense some chance of figuring out what ads are most suited to them.
Much has been written about Yahoo's Panama technology. It's my belief that it will be a failure because the click rate for ads on a page depends on how accurately the ads match the content of the page. Panama will fail for the same reason that Yahoo has failed in search, because matching ads to page content requires superior search technology.
Yahoo's present pathetic condition is saddening because at one time it was "the portal" to the Internet. But Internet lifespans are shorter than industrial lifespans. Look at Netscape, AOL, Altavista ...
Category: Search-Engines