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The experiment involved for the first time a macroscopic atomic object containing thousands of billions of atoms. They also teleported the information a distance of half a meter
October 30, 2006
links for 2006-10-30
October 29, 2006
Information asymmetry, access and development
In On Cell Phones and Indian Fishing, Greg Mankiw points to an article in The Washington Post:
“The two crucial changes that have happened in my lifetime,” said Jayan Kadavunkassery, 37, an Andavan crewman in a pink button-down shirt and a lungi, “are the inboard motor and the mobile phone.”
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Rajan said that before he got his first cellphone a few years ago, he used to arrive at port with a load of fish and hope for the best. The wholesaler on the dock knew that Rajan’s un-iced catch wouldn’t last long in the fiery Indian sun. So, Rajan said, he was forced to take whatever price was offered — without having any idea whether dealers in the next port were offering twice as much. Now he calls several ports while he’s still at sea to find the best prices, playing the dealers against one another to drive up the price.
I don’t know about inboard motors, but the easy access to mobile telephony is quite a change in India. Today, cellphone connections can be had in a matter of minutes, and why stop at the cellphones, a fixed line can be had in a few hours, or a day at the most. A far cry from the situation just a few years ago when it was common to be on a wait list for a telephone connection. My parents endured a 12 years wait circa 1990 for the monopoly operator to bless them with a phone connection. Now, India is going through a phase of growth in the telecommunications sector and the overall teledensity is up and increasing. With an addition of an average 6million connections every month, the Indian telecom industry is going through a boom which is, important to consider, happening outside the planning process almost beyond the controlled license raj of yore. What remains is further penetration in the rural areas, and increased coverage outside of circle A and B cities. For continued growth, specially in rural geographies, wider adoption of GSM is the most logical choice considering the wide availability and downward trends in prices of GSM handsets.
Coming back to the main point of the above post, access to relevant information is empowering growth and development by helping the prime agents in making decisions. A paper by Robert Jensen considers the effect of information assymetry on welfare, in line with the growing field of information economics. The paper is not available online as of now, Greg Mankiw has posted some of the abstract, the starting line from which reads:
When information is limited or costly, agents are unable to engage in optimal arbitrage. Excess price dispersion across markets can arise and goods may not be allocated efficiently; in this setting, information technologies may improve market performance and increase welfare.
That explains it succinctly.Another success story as a proof of increase in welfare and development driven by access to technology and information is provided by the eChoupal project of ITC. The project was a winner in the Economic Development category of the Stockholm Challenge 2006 and the Development Gateway award in 2005. The important difference being that for the eChoupal network deployment, the main driver is a need to get access to the producers. The fishermen on the other hand, the producers themselves, are riding the wave of wider deployment of mature technologies which benefit from a continual reduction in the barriers of adoption.
links for 2006-10-29
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A searchable library of computer science events, index of calls for papers (CFPs), proposals, demos, posters, participation, etc. for conferences, journals, books, tutorials, as well as any other relevant event.
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A list of calls for papers for conferences, journals, and other events relevant to Wireless and Mobile Communications, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics, and Computer Science.
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Important dates for conferences (and workshops and symposia) in the field of communication networks and mobility
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Boric acid is one of the most effective cockroach control agents ever developed provided that it is used correctly
October 27, 2006
links for 2006-10-27
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Recent study that shows that learning triggers the retention of the new brain cells and the laying down of memories – “Regardless of the details, though, this would appear to be a clear case of “use it or lose it”. So keep reading. It may be good for
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globals considered harmful
October 26, 2006
links for 2006-10-26
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All set to play junkyard wars..
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Every Darwin publication as well as many of his handwritten manuscripts
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Not from the ISS but a nice bunch of aerial shots
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rocket and space shuttle launches
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Aerial view of the STS-2 Columbia launch taken by astronaut John Young aboard NASA’s Shuttle Training Aircraft
October 21, 2006
links for 2006-10-21
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There are four phases in the life cycle of a technology (the fluid, the transitional, the mature and the discontinuities phases), and depending on where a particular technology is at the moment, only certain external partnerships will facilitate speedy de
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Draft of a textbook on computational complexity theory that is intended as a text for an advanced undergraduate course or introductory graduate course, or as a reference for researchers and students in computer science and allied fields such as mathematic
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Chip-wide communication infrastructures is becoming increasingly important.. for example to construct flexible multi-use designs and platforms, to aid the increased use of parallel architectures, ( e.g chip multiprocessors, tiled processors and beyond). H
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Hoysala trio – Belur, Halebid and Somnathapura
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…What the Parthenon is to Greece and the pyramids to Egypt, the Hoysala temples are to South Indian architecture…
On Chip Networks and teraflop computing
Last week in a keynote at IDF in bangalore, Intel’s senior fellow Kevin Kahn had a designer from Intel’s India Development centre come up on the stage and show a shining new wafer containing an experimental teraflop programmable processor with 80 cores on the chip. EETimes has more detail:
Each tile includes a small core, or compute element, with a simple instruction set for processing floating-point data,…
The tile also includes a router connecting the core to an on-chip network that links all the cores to each other and gives them access to memory. The second major part is a 20-Mbyte SRAM memory chip that is stacked on and bonded to the processor die. Stacking the die makes possible thousands of interconnects and provides more than a terabyte-per-second of bandwidth between memory and the cores…
“When combined with our recent breakthroughs in silicon photonics, these experimental chips address the three major requirements for terascale computing—Tflops of performance, terabytes-per-second of memory bandwidth, and terabits-per-second of I/O capacity,”…
One of the key challanges faced, as briefly mentioned at the IDF here, was a need for them to come up with an interconnection fabric. This PDF at Intel’s site has some graphical representation of such interconnects and some more information. A few interesting problems arise at such scale of computing, the bibliography at the On-Chip Network resource page seems like a good place to explore more.
October 20, 2006
links for 2006-10-20
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Workflow for working with HDR and Tonemapping in Linux
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A set of command line (and one GUI) programs for reading, writing, manipulating and viewing high-dynamic range (HDR) images and video frames
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Implementation of tone mapping operators suitable for convenient processing of both static images and animations
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High dynamic range imaging (HDRI) is a set of techniques that allow a far greater dynamic range of exposures (i.e a large difference between light and dark areas) than normal digital imaging techniques. The intention of HDRI is to accurately represent the
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Doxygen can generate an on-line documentation browser (in HTML) and/or an off-line reference manual Latex from a set of documented source files.
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Dynamic range explained.
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..Cleaning is like removing a few cars from one lane of a two-lane highway. New cars (piles) step in quickly to fill the temporary gap. In a multi-person household, cleaning just shifts the traffic into different lanes rather than pricing the road..
October 19, 2006
links for 2006-10-19
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Trip Report: Ad-Hoc Meeting on Threads in C++
The C++ standardization committee is hard at work standardizing threads for the next version of C++. Some members recently met to discuss the issues,
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Flickr Photo Download: Guide to Springfield – The Simpsons
The simpsons…
Chaotic flexibility or predictable rigidity, pick one?
After an example describing the differences in two different systems, The Rational Fool asks in A Clash of Cultures:
Which is better, chaotic flexibility or predictable rigidity?
I don’t have to think too hard for this, I’d go with predicable rigidity anyday. The simple reason; given access to up to date information, rigidity is managable and easier to adapt to.
