2002

Problems in online education. David McGrath teach English online. He ends up …

spending hours copying excerpts from her paper into cheater catching software programs and search engines to verify that it was authentic. [It is not authentic] 30 to 40 percent of the time.

Universities today certify the ability to do original work, in addition to training students. Corporates, I think, value the ability to create a good quality report, irrespective of originality. This is a mismatch. Maybe the whole objective of courses, at least online courses, will change shortly. via Plastic.

Opera works well with mobile phones. I don’t understand how, personally, but Opera has revamped its site focusing on smartphones, and seems to have a good technology here.

Nicholas Negroponte on “Being Wireless”.

Five years ago, I put a wireless LAN in my home in Boston. At the time it cost about $2,000 for the base station and $500 for each device I wanted to connect. Today, it costs $120 and $50, respectively, and the price is dropping.

That’s about Rs. 10,000. My next gadget is identified.

The Economist on the Nobel prize in medicine.

The Human Genome Project was a formidable achievement, but one that was managerial as much as scientific, and there is no Nobel prize for management. Instead, Sir John has been given a prize for real scientific work which nobody could doubt was of Nobel quality.

Lessig argues copyright to the Supreme Court. Lawrence Lessig is a Professor of Law at Stanford, and argues against excessive legislation of the Internet and related technologies. Good guy.

India to go the Linux way. Department of IT will support Linux as the de facto standard in academic institutions. Possibly elsewhere in the future.

The Mumbai Bloggers’ Meet photos are out of action. The site should be back some time today. The page is about 1.5MB (including pictures), and my quota is 50MB per day. So about 33 hits is enough to kill the page.

Spotted this ad on Business Standard. It was at the bottom of the page, and initially, I thought it really was an ant crawling across my laptop. Incidentally, catching the ant is not all that easy. Took me a minute. But once you catch it, it stays put.

Business Standard no longer has an ad with an ant crawling across the bottom of the page.

Tomorrow’s leaders: opinion on IIT/IIM grads by T N Ninan at Business Standard. From his interviews for the Aditya Birla scholarships, and observes that there is a lack of awareness about India among them, and that the real value of the IITs/IIMs is in the selection process, not the education. I disagree on the latter. I think the 4+2 years of intense competition also adds value. The curriculum, however, may or may not.

India in the eyes of Al Beruni, an Arabic historian around 1000AD. It is interesting to note the reversal of several customs among Hindus and Muslims. Particularly that “In all consultations and emergencies they [Hindus] take advice of the women.” via Narayana Murthy’s comment