I could have been Newton...

It is said that if Newton had not discovered the principles of Gravity, somebody else surely would have. This has been proved time and again, Ramanujam reputedly singlehandedly calculated all the mathematical principles that the world had done in the for the past 100 years or so, because nobody told him that someone had already done so...

Why am I talking about this?

I thought it might be neat idea to use WiFi as a third standard for 3rd gen mobile telephony (apart from GSM, CDMA), by piggybacking VoIP on WiFi. simpe isn't it.

It turns out that half the world is already working on it... Not only working on it but a search for it tells that it is talking about it like crazy. And not only working on it & talking about it, but also taking steps to counter/co-opt it, as last month's (sorry can't lcoate it online) issue of wired reports...

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Kindle in India

Please note: Amazon has released new versions of the Kindle. For prices and features, please go to Prices in India of New Kindles 3G+WiFi and WiFi editions Original Post: My wife decided that she needed to gift me a Kindle for our anniversary. I asked a colleague, if her husband (who was traveling to the US) could carry back one. He couldn't, because of an erratic travel schedule. So we decided to order one right here directly since Amazon was kind enough to open up direct shipping to India. So we ordered on a Tuesday evening (India Time) and Amazon being Amazon shipped the device straight away on the same day itself. I very eagerly tracked the package using the DHL sites (yes, I used three different DHL sites, US, UK and India. They give different info when the package is in that respective country) and in three days flat it was here across the seven seas at Delhi airport. Only I was in Noida which is an interstate delivery for DHL. Which meant that I had to fill out an ar...

What Did You Build This Week? Rethinking Education for the AI Age

My sixteen-year-old son spent a weekend fine-tuning an mBERT language model with labeled hate speech data, then benchmarked it against MuRIL, a publicly available model for Indian languages. No assignment. No tutorial. Just Google AI Studio, Google Colab, and curiosity. He'd essentially skipped to the end of a university summer school curriculum. Using mBERT and MuRIL is advanced deep learning. Most students start with if/else logic and work their way up to Transformers over years. He started with Transformers. When he got interested in AI/ML summer programs like NUS, we looked at the syllabi. He was already beyond where the program would end. That's when it crystallized for me: we're teaching kids to write code in an era when AI writes code. We're drilling them in syntax when they need judgment. We're preparing them for an education system that's already obsolete. The Assessment Crisis The real issue isn't learning. It's testing. We test memorisation be...

Prices in India of New Kindles 3G+WiFi and WiFi editions

Amazon has release two new Kindles, one with 3G and WiFi (3G is free for use everywhere in the world) for $189 and one model with only WiFi for $139. 3G + WiFi model is available in Graphite and White and the Wifi Model is available only in White Graphite. The landed cost of 3G+Wifi version is ~$284 which is approximately Rs. 13,300 The landed cost of just the Wifi version is ~$216 which is approximately Rs. 10,100 The New Kindle has better contrast (50% better than the previous models) 21% smaller size (while keeping the same size screen) 15% lighter 20% faster page turns Storage has doubled one MONTH battery life As always the Kindle DX model is available in Graphite for $379, (landed cost $540 which is approximately Rs. 25,200)

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