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The overheads of outsourcing

Munjal Shah, CEO of riya.com/like.com blogs about having to close their Bangalore office. The overheads of having multiple sites geographically separated (especially for a small start-up) are just not worth the (fast reducing) cost savings. for:

Bangalore wages have just been growing like crazy. To give you an example, there is an employee of ours who took the first 5 years of his career to get from 1% to 10% of his equivalent US counterpart. He then jumped from 10% to 20% of his US counterpart in the next 1 year. During his time with us (less than 2 years) he jumped to 55% of the US wage. In the next few months we would have had to move him to 75% just to “keep him at market.”

Keep in mind that Riya are at the leading edge of this trend. We tend to only hire folks from IIT or other top schools. We tend to only hire the smartest folks from these schools. We only hire in Bangalore (just too hard to have three offices). We tend to only hire folks with a lot of experience. These are all characteristics that are critical for technology startups, but not necessarily for a big company like IBM or a services company like Infosys who can afford to train new graduates. I do believe that other startups in Bangalore will see the same issue in 12-24 months.

See full article.
I found it here.

Sheep sold as poodles

My friends often think that I make up some of the stories I tell them. You can’t make these things up. I don’t have that much imagination. For example, see this:

Thousands of Japanese people have apparently been scammed into buying “poodles” that are actually sheep with fancy haircuts. The scam was uncovered after actress Maiko Kawakami showed a photo of her pet poodle on TV and commented that it “didn’t bark and refused to eat dog food,”

Pictures are here. One of the commenters there asks whether this is what is meant by a sheepdog.

Source: boing-boing.

Update: Hmmm… Taste of my own medicine. Normally, people forward me all kinds of internet crap, and I have to tell them it is a hoax. Now I got the same thing done to me. In the comments below, MJ points out that this is a hoax. Snopes (one of my favorite sites on the internet) has officially debunked the story. Serves me right for being too credulous.

‘Toy library’ promotes cleanup AND creativity

Your kids have too many toys? House is cluttered all the time? Maybe it is time to implement a toy library. This is a shelf in the corner of your house where the bulk of the toys sit, and your kids only get to check out a few toys at a time. Want another toy? Return something first! There are a bunch of interesting ideas in this post at parenthacks. Including:

Additional functions of the toy library:

1) Toy timeout home. When toys are left on the floor after cleanup time, they go to the library for time out. [...] If you want a toy to remain available, it has to be put away.

See full article.

Poetry for the deaf

What is it like to be deaf?
People have asked me.
Deaf? Oh, hmmm, how do I explain that?
Simply, I can’t hear.
Nooo, it is much more than that.
It is similar to a goldfish in a bowl.
Always observing things going on.
People talking all the time.
It is being a man on his own island
Among foreigners.
Isolation is no stranger to me.
Relatives say hi and bye.
But I sit for five hours among them.
Talking great pleasure at amusing babies.

The peom continues here.

This post by Rujuta got me thinking about deafness in general, and sign language in particular. She attended a workshop centered around deaf people in Pune conducted by Avanti!!. Her post isfull of interesting tid-bits that make you think. What I found most thought provoking was how well-meaning efforts by others sometimes simply work to rub salt in the wounds. For example, did you know that the award-winning acting of Amitabh and Rani in Black was not really enjoyed by deaf people because they couldn’t really make out the sign language? Turns out Amitabh and Rani were pretty bad with sign language. Remember the “news for the deaf” on Doordarshan on Sunday afternoons? Here’s the inside scoop:

In India there are no television channels, which the deaf people can enjoy just like the hearing people. The only news channel that has news for deaf people once a week is the national Doordarshan channel. But that’s no good as apparently in that show they use sign language used by a small deaf community in Delhi and not the Indian sign language. So this news hour is just watched by hearing people, as deaf people spread across India don’t understand this sign language.

I have also been a little interested in Sign Language. About a month back, I bought a book on sign language - on a whim. I had an idea in mind that I’ll take it up as a hobby. I had recently learned that sign language is not just a simple matter of translating the words of your regular “hearing” language into gestures - it is much more interesting with its own rules. That sounded interesting to me.
Here is what wikipedia has to say about sign language:

Sign Language for “I love you”

In linguistic terms, sign languages are as rich and complex as any oral language, despite the common misconception that they are not “real languages”. Professional linguists have studied many sign languages and found them to have every linguistic component required to be classed as true languages.

[...]
Many unique linguistic features emerge from sign languages’ ability to produce meaning in different parts of the visual field simultaneously. For example, the recipient of a signed message can read meanings carried by the hands, the facial expression and the body posture in the same moment. This is in contrast to oral languages, where the sounds that comprise words are mostly sequential (tone being an exception).

A gesture made with the hands can mean quite different things if done with an angry expression as opposed to a smile. A gesture made with hands at the shoulder level of the speaker (technically “signer”) can mean something different from the same gesture made with the hands at the hip level. Fascinating stuff. But only when I started googling sign language for this blog post did I find that there is a large body of sign language poetry.

Exemplary for the mature status of sign languages is the growing body of sign language poetry, and other stage performances. The poetic mechanisms available to signing poets are not all available to a speaking poet. This offers new, exciting ways for poems to reach and move the audience.

Google for deaf poetry. You’ll be fascinated by the stuff you find.

If you are from Pune, you might be interested in this: Avanti!! will conduct classes on sign language starting in June. Contact avanti-pune@hotmail.com if you are interested.

The smell of piracy

Piracy stinks. Literally.

Apparently, handburnt DVDs smell different than mass-produced once.
So the cops are using dogs to sniff out pirated CDs. And the crime bosses have put a bounty on the head of a couple of sniffer dogs.

Found here.

Do Bachchon Ki Ma: Patch, the dog - I mean - Patch, the baby

The Mad Momma has this heart-breaking post about dealing with her baby’s medical problems. Very nicely written.

We took her home with the prescribed medication and sat down to bathe her, moisturise her and apply the medication. And the Brat came along and kept kissing her - big, wet open mouthed kisses all over her body, ingesting the ointment. I tried to stop him and gave up. Let him love his little Beanie baby as much as he wants.

Worth reading, if for nothing other than to just see how well she captures the anguish she feels.

Source: desicritics.

Global dimming

You’ve heard about global warming, but did you know about the (possibly more serious) issue of global dimming?

The sun keeps us (i.e. the earth) warm. And gives us all energy and life. And over the last 50 years, the amount of sunlight reaching the earth’s surface has reduced by about 1 to 3% per decade.

And the culprit is air pollution. Some of the pollutants absorb the sunlight before it reaches us, while others reflect it back into space.

Golden Gate Bridge with California’s characteristic brown cloud in the background — the most likely cause of global dimming. Photo CC 2004 by Aaron Logan

There are a number of interesting issues related to this:

• Global dimming might be masking the effects of global warming.
• For the few days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, temperatures were 1 to 2 degrees higher than average in the US. Due to fewer jet flights, resulting in fewer aircraft contrails (aka vapor trails).
• There exists something called the Asian Brown Cloud which sits over India and much of South and South-East Asia which is being blamed for a lot of things.

I found out about this from this Straight Dope article.

Fast Food: Ads vs. Reality

These guys bought a whole bunch of fast food items, took photographs of them, and then compared them to the photographs of the same items in ads.

A reader over at boingboing has this to say:

I worked (briefly) in the photogoraphy studio of one of the biggest ad agencies in NYC. They paid a professional “food stylist” around $2000 a day to make the food look like that. Every golden sesame seed or drop of crystaline dew was hand placed. That maoynaise isn’t mayo, it’s hair gel and that chicken looks so good because aparently everything looks yummier when it’s been sprayed with laquer. A lot of that “food” isn’t food at all and the stuff that is food has been treated with more chemicals and “tricks of the trade” than most super models.

How to make great powerpoint presentations

Marketing Guru Seth Godin has this insightful post on the right and the wrong way to make powerpoint presentations. The basic idea he espouses is that the powerpoint slides should be used to sell your idea emotionally. Don’t put facts and figures and numbers - that can go in the document that you leave behind.

Talking about pollution in Houston? Instead of giving me four bullet points of EPA data, why not read me the stats but show me a photo of a bunch of dead birds, some smog and even a diseased lung? This is cheating! It’s unfair! It works.

He goes on to give a bunch of DOs and DONTs which are worth thinking about. For example

Sound effects can be used a few times per presentation, but never use the sound effects that are built in to the program. Instead, rip sounds and music from CDs and leverage the Proustian effect this can have. If people start bouncing up and down to the Grateful Dead, you’ve kept them from falling asleep, and you’ve reminded them that this isn’t a typical meeting you’re running.

Read the whole post.

I like what you like

The New York Times has a very interesting article about herd instinct. The main point it makes is that people tend to like things that they think other people like (or will like). In other words, Himesh Reshammiya is popular because he is popular. Of course, people do have intrinsic likes and dislikes which are independent of what other people think - but equally, if not more more important role is played by the “social” aspect.

And of course, there is research to prove this point.

They created 9 different websites of music by unknown artists. Users of these websites could download and listen to the music. On 8 of those websites, the users could see how often a song had been downloaded by others in the past (from that website only). And on the last one, they had no idea of the popularity of the song. And a bunch of interesting results emerge:

First, if people know what they like regardless of what they think other people like, the most successful songs should draw about the same amount of the total market share in both the independent and social-influence conditions — that is, hits shouldn’t be any bigger just because the people downloading them know what other people downloaded. And second, the very same songs — the “best” ones — should become hits in all social-influence worlds.

What we found, however, was exactly the opposite. In all the social-influence worlds, the most popular songs were much more popular (and the least popular songs were less popular) than in the independent condition. At the same time, however, the particular songs that became hits were different in different worlds, just as cumulative-advantage theory would predict. Introducing social influence into human decision making, in other words, didn’t just make the hits bigger; it also made them more unpredictable.

On an average, they found that a song that was was a top-5 song in terms of intrinsic quality (the 9th website), had only a 50%
chance of making it into the top-5 list by popularity.

So that should explain why shakalakalakalakalakalakalakalaka shakalaka boom boom is assaulting my ears everywhere. And why Aap ka Suroor is even happening.