Posts Tagged ‘information technology’

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Can Information Technology Eliminate Cultural Barriers? Monday, November 15th, 2010

In eras past, if you wanted to read materials published in another language, you had to wait for someone who knew both that and your languages to do a translation. Even then, you might never become aware of the translated publication or get access to it. These days, Google will translate, say a German page into English, at the click of a button.

Language has been a major barrier between cultures. When you cannot understand what the speaker of another language is saying, you tend to lose interest in that person (and the person’s culture). On the other hand, if there was some device like Google’s German to English (and vice versa) translation that can tackle the comprehension problem, it is possible that greater understanding will develop among different cultures.

The context for the above thoughts was the launching of Indian Language Technology Proliferation and Deployment Center’ (ILTP-DC) in India recently. The center has stated objectives “to facilitate human-machine interaction without language barrier” and “creating and accessing multilingual knowledge resources” among others.

India has 18 “official” languages and a hundred and more “unofficial” ones. If the ILTP-DC can indeed make it possible to translate content in one of these languages to another with the ease of Google, probably the extent of divisiveness among its people could lessen.

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Posted in communications, information technology | No Comments »

Have You Heard of Computers that Don’t Need an Electricity Connection? Friday, November 12th, 2010

Well, that’s just what India’s i-slate is. It is a low-cost, low-energy tablet PC that works on solar power. It was designed for schools in remote rural areas of India that do not yet have electricity.

I-slate resulted from a collaborative effort among Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Houston’s Rice University and an Indian NGO, Villages for Development and Learning Foundation (ViDAL). The project is being carried out at NTU’s Institute of Sustainable and Applied Infodynamics (ISAID) under the leadership of Rice University’s Prof. Krishna Palem.

The i-slate uses a new type of ultra-energy-efficient microchip being developed by ISAID and the Swiss Center for Electronics and Microtechnology. It needs only a fraction of the electricity consumed by conventional chips and makes it possible to run the i-slate on solar power from panels similar to those used in hand-held calculators.

The i-slate was field tested with a class of 10 to 13 year-olds at a rural school near Hyderabad and the kids reportedly picked up the technology fast. Further tests are scheduled soon.

The development team is now planning to improve the hardware and add more teaching content.

Developments like these help sustainability initiatives and bridge the digital divide between rich and poor sections of society.

Read the news at emerging-technology-talks blog.

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Posted in education delivery, information technology | 1 Comment »

Is “Private” Cloud a Negation of the Term? Wednesday, November 10th, 2010

What is Cloud Computing?

According to Phil Wainwright, cloud computing consultant, true cloud computing involves four elements:

* Abstraction of the infrastructure in that it is not tied to any specific hardware or operating software. Any component of the infrastructure can be changed without affecting the operation of what is being computed. In practice, this typically means virtualization i.e. independence from the physical infrastructure.
* On-demand, pay-as-you-go service delivery. The provision of the service on-demand and billing only for the resources actually used is a major characteristic of the cloud. It is this characteristic that constitutes the main appeal of cloud computing to most.
* Thousands of users using the shared infrastructure, an infrastructure that is constantly refreshed based on user suggestions, with the latest version being available to all users.
* Cloud is an environment where any user is able to get just the type of computing the person or organization needs. In practice, this becomes possible through the scale of operations and the APIs that make it possible to customize the computing.

Considered against the parameters above, Private cloud is a misnomer as far as the “cloud” part is concerned. The “private” part typically involves duplicating much of the infrastructure, thus losing out on a major benefit of cloud computing. Another plus, viz. benefiting from the contributions of thousands of users, is also lost when the “cloud” becomes private.

Read the original blog post at ZDNet Blog.

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Posted in cloud computing, information technology | No Comments »

Allow Wikipedia for Research, Says one Parent Tuesday, November 9th, 2010

A blog writer’s kids were assigned papers to write, and told not to use Wikipedia as reference source. They were instead told to use the first three hits on Google, it seems. The blog writer felt this was a poor policy on the part of schools.

Wikipedia has content that schools (and even parents) seek to filter out. However, wikipedia also has a policy that requires citations, references, and links to verifiable primary sources and further reading. If these are not present, the article will typically have a highly visible header indicating that the article is not up to Wikipedia standards.

The attention of students should be directed to these aspects, feels the blog author. They should learn the value of citing sources and verifying the authenticity of all statements by referring to multiple sources, for example. And Wikipedia is a good reference point to learn these habits.

Students can be told not to depend on the Wikipedia article alone and asked to follow the further-reading links and other sources to verify the authenticity of the Wikipedia content. They can even be asked to check the top box about quality of each article, and ignore those articles where citations and references are lacking.

In this way, they will acquire the habit of supporting every statement with verifiable sources. This is definitely a better alternative compared to landing at “kanye-west-30-seconds-to-mars-mtv-ema-2010″ music news on a search for Mars at Google.

Read the blog at ZDNet Education Blog.

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Posted in information technology, reference material | 2 Comments »

Dividing up Complex IT Systems into Manageable Chunks Monday, November 8th, 2010

According to one expert, 50 percent of IT projects exceeding $2 million are destined to fail. And the potential for failure goes up to 100 percent as the project size gets much larger. On the other hand, projects of $750,000 or less have good chances of succeeding.

What this view leads to is the conclusion that complex projects are better divided up into smaller chunks. That concept was what Henry Ford applied in his assembly line. He broke up a complex production process into a series of smaller processes.

Office processes also got chunked into word processing, database management, reporting, etc with the arrival of computers.

Chunking is thus not a new concept. What is perhaps new is the suggestion that software packages should not come in the form of a complex offering. Instead, complex software should be divided up into manageable chunks using such approaches as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) where smaller software modules render specific services which together deliver the desired result.

The question is whether such a design is always possible. Earlier efforts in this direction, such as the CORBA (Component Object Request Broker Architecture), had not exactly succeeded. Read the views of one author at ZDNet Blog.

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Posted in best practices, information technology | 1 Comment »

IPv6 – The What and Why Friday, November 5th, 2010

Have you ever wondered how the Internet brings so much information so quickly from all over the world to your desktop? If you have, then IPv6 and IPv4 might prove of some interest to you. Both these are “protocols” that define how data is sent from one computer to another.

When a number of computers are connected to one another so that their users can communicate with one another and work in a collaborative manner, we have a computer network. And when different such computer networks are connected to each other, we have internetworking or the Internet.

To ensure that information sent across such vast networks as the Internet reaches the intended destination, you need to assign a unique ID to each computer or other device connected to the Internet. With billions of computers and devices so connected, and the number expected to increase at a fast rate, it is expected that by 2012 the IPv4 protocol will be unable to provide such unique IDs to all of them.

IPv4 uses a 32 bit ID (IP address) generation scheme, meaning that it can generate a maximum of only 232 distinct addresses. To overcome the inadequacy of addresses, ad hoc solutions such as Network Address Translation (NAT) have been used. NAT translates one IP address to another so that, for example, the unique IDs of a number of computers in a particular computer network can be translated to a single IP address when connecting to the Internet.

IPv6 seeks to provide a more lasting solution to the problem by using a 128 bit addressing scheme. This will allow the generation of 2128 distinct IP addresses. IPv6 also eliminates some specific features of IPv4 that leads to inefficiencies.

You can learn much more about IPv6 at ipv6.com.

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Posted in information technology, internet | No Comments »

Web 1.0 to Web 3.0 Sunday, October 31st, 2010

There is no standard definition from any authoritative body on these terms. Instead, experts note certain trends and coin terms like Web 2.0 to denote the dominance of specific characteristics of a trend.

Web 2.0 is generally defined as the dominance of two-way communication on the Web. Under the original Web, communication was generally one-way, as when a company website puts it product catalog on the Web. Consumers just browsed the catalog and bought a particular item.

With the appearance of blogs, discussion forums, user-edited Wikis, freewheeling interactions on social networking sites like Facebook and more such, the consumer entered the scenario as a major player. People interacted on the Web and these discussions affected their views, opinions and also actions. It is this socialization of the Web that is defined as Web 2.0.

The online catalog company might now allow customers to post product reviews on their website, as Amazon did. And companies might also get into the game themselves writing blogs, participating in discussion forums and social networking interactions, and generally mingling with the Web crowd and getting to become opinion makers. In these ways, businesses get to receive insights into customer minds and even influence customer decisions.

Web 3.0 is viewed as a “semantic” Web. What this means is that the information delivered by the Web will be more relevant and meaningful. As things stand now, we are all familiar with the frustratingly irrelevant results that we often get in response to our searches at search engines. We have to do a lot or research to find exactly what we want.

This happens because search engines go by the words we type in search boxes in a very “literal” way. They bring back all pages that contain the search words, or keywords. However, the same word used in different contexts can have very different meanings. As a result, many results of the search become irrelevant.

In a semantic Web, search engines will be able to understand exactly what we are searching for and bring back really relevant results.

In this semantic Web, or Web 3.0, we can ask questions in plain language and the Web will mine the huge volume of resources it has available and bring back the “right” answer. The Web will be able to make the right connections between different bits of information it has collected, and give us meaningful information.

How to do this is still being worked out (otherwise, it would already have been available).

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Posted in information technology, trends, web 3.0 | 2 Comments »

The World Wide Web Experience Friday, October 29th, 2010

The World Wide Web is no more a boring place. You can see fantastic effects on Web pages. In addition to plain old text, you can listen to music, see animated things and video clips and even full feature films. You can also interact with the page by entering something into form fields and receiving an appropriate response.

Things were not always like this (as the current Web user generation might assume). Web pages are creates using HTML, and that language was designed for scientific stuff (the Internet was the preserve of scientists in those days). HTML had to go through several versions, and browser makers had to make their products compatible with the evolving HTML standards, before things began to change noticeably.

In the meanwhile, third parties were at work. Browser makers introduced their own non-standard tricks in their browsers. And programs residing on the Web servers did some processing to generate pages on the fly before sending them to the clients, viz. browsers.

Then JavaScript and Flash came along to create some interesting effects at the client end itself. Web developers put some script or code into the HTML of the pages and these were processed by the browsers at the user end, instead of being to sent to the server to process and send back the result.

Java language (not to be confused with JavaScript) introduced servlets that made development of full fledged Web applications easier. Web applications are just like any other software, but executed in a Web browser over the Internet or Intranet.

Ajax was a concept that involved using different technologies like Java, JavaScript, Flash, DHTML etc to create highly interactive and interesting Web applications. Sliverlight from Microsoft and Air from Adobe also focused on Web applications.

It is the result of all these developments that you see on the Web now. Of course, there might be some over use of the effects to create irritating experiences; but few will want to go back to the old boring text Web.

In fact, we might soon be using Web based operating systems such as Google’s Chrome OS that boots up in no time (instead of after an interminable time of mysterious processes under a Windows OS, for example). And Adobe Air has already put Web applications executable offline, i.e. even when you are not connected to the Web.

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Posted in cloud computing, information technology, trends | No Comments »

Suzlon and IBM: Focusing on Core Strengths Tuesday, October 26th, 2010

Suzlon is the world’s third largest wind turbine generator (WTG) manufacturer. IBM is an information technology (IT) giant aware of the potential of IT to help business management. The two have now entered into a five year partnership agreement under which IBM will provide business consulting services to Suzlon and will also manage its application development and maintenance requirements.

Suzlon expects this partnership to help it improve the efficiency of its worldwide operations and the productivity of its IT applications. Suzlon has presence in over 25 countries with component specific and also integrated manufacturing units. In India, Belgium, Denmark, Germany and The Netherlands, it also has R&D centers.

IBM’s focus will be on helping Suzlon use IT for transformational goals rather than worry about everyday transaction management. IBM will help streamline IT operations and make it a true service facility actively supporting optimal utilization of resources at optimum costs.

Whereas earlier IBM was primarily a vendor, it has now become a strategic partner enabling Suzlon derive the benefits of fast changing technology. As Suzlon spokesperson mentions, the company wants to be able to use up to date IT to meet the complex business requirements of its global expansion plans.

Read the news release at India PRWire.

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Posted in business transformation, information technology | No Comments »

Mobile Phones and Poverty Saturday, October 23rd, 2010

In a village in Kerala, India, when mobile phones arrived on the scene, a few three-wheeler taxi drivers began to use it. And when the word spread among taxi users, they began to call the taxi drivers on the phone for trips. The result was that those drivers who had bought mobile phones saw a jump in their business.

Earlier, prospective customers had to go to taxi stands and hire any available taxi. Now, they could phone a particular taxi driver whenever they wanted to go on a trip. Result: the mobile phone owner got more business compared to the random hires at the taxi stand.

These days, almost all drivers have a mobile phone, and have specific customers who almost always call them.

Mobile phones benefit the poorer sections in other ways too. It enables farmers and others in remote areas to get connected with markets. It gives rise to new businesses, such as selling SIM cards on commission and servicing handsets. These businesses do not need big investments or a high level of skill.

However, such an impact can come about only if mobile phone use is widespread in rural as well as urban areas. And that means the handsets and usage costs are affordable to the people in the country. India has achieved this goal and mobile phone use is widespread even in rural areas.

Read the Information Economy Report 2010 on ICTs, Enterprises and Poverty Alleviation published by the UN agency UNCTAD.

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Posted in communications, information technology, wireless communication | No Comments »

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