Yantrakaal

We are all familiar with carbon intelligence - the natural human intelligence that has given us everything from the fire and the wheel,  through the Ved, Upanishad, the Mahabharat, the Laws of Mechanics, Electrodynamics, Thermodynamics all the way through to Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. Near the end of this journey we have run into silicon intelligence or the artificial intelligence that is demonstrated by machine learning and neural networks that has given us autonomous vehicles and software that learns to play very realistic games. But somewhere along the line these two forms of intelligence -- carbon and silicon -- are coming together to create what sci-fi has been talking about for many years : the cyborg -- part human and part machine. Where are we on this technology? Is it still science fiction? or is fiction becoming a fact. I explore this idea in this lecture that I delivered to the incoming  (July 2020) batch of  Data Science students at the Praxis Business ...

Managing a business enterprise is impossible if the manager is not at ease with dealing with data. While soft skills and EQ are important, when push comes to shove it is data on the table that really matters. Data driven decisions are the backbone of any efficient enterprise. It is said that data is the new oil because of its intrinsic value. This is why the most powerful companies on the planet, like Google, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon owe their immense clout  to the huge amount of data that they have accumulated about people and their behaviour. Gathering, storing, managing these multi-terabytes (or more) of data is loosely referred to as Big Data. But using this data to draw inferences about the past and more importantly making predictions about the future is Data Science. Managers in the past were not unaware of or indifferent to the importance of data. Many of them have been using spreadsheets like Excel to assist them in their daily work. However the volume of data in th...

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In an earlier post, we had introduced the idea of D I G I T A L I C S Here is a video that explains it further

image from MIT Review When resources are limited it is creativity and its first cousin, innovation, that allows us to get ahead by achieving more with less. In practical terms it translates into the importance of R&D in corporates, or its precursor, research in academia. Which is why publish or perish has been the guiding mantra for those seeking tenure -- or permanent employment -- in US academic institutions. Since the US is the fountainhead of the most innovative ideas in STEM and related disciplines there must be a positive correlation between innovation and publications. This is the logic used in China where it is mandatory for all academicians to be prolific in publishing papers. This policy has resulted in interesting developments. First, China -- and Chinese researchers embedded in US academia --  lead the world in terms of the sheer number of papers published. Second, a large number of these papers have been found to be of poor quality if not actually fraudulent. ...

Time for India to lead the world with thorium power plants Global warming is a source of concern because it is believed to be leading to drastic changes in weather patterns.  This could cause serious damage to both the economy and the ecosystem. The burning of carbonaceous fossil fuels, coal and oil, are said to be the most important cause for global warming because they lead to the discharge of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and this in turn traps solar heat through the greenhouse effect. Hence many activists have argued against the usage of coal and oil, in thermal power plants and internal combustion engines, and demand conversion to electric power. But while the usage of electric power is certainly clean, electricity itself needs to be generated somehow -- it just cannot appear by magic in those two or three holes in the wall. Two clean sources of electricity are solar and wind and activists have long argued that these should be the basis of electricity generation in...