I was listening to a Science Friday podcast and one of the topics was about storing data using DNA. Both DNA computing and DNA storage has always fascinated me. As we all know, DNA has a very long shelf life! The half life of DNA has recently been estimated to be 521 years under certain conditions such as vacuum packed and at -80 degree Celsius. That would roughly translate to over a million years of shelf time before the DNA disintegrates into something that is no longer useful. Given what we have seen of the shelf lives of digital storage media such as CDs and DVDs, this sounds pretty good.

In addition, the “storage density” of DNA is very impressive! In a recent study, scientists from Columbia University reported that they have developed a method through which they can store 215 petabytes of data in just 1 gram of DNA. A petabyte is a mere million gigabytes and all of it in 1 gram of DNA. How impressive is that! If you are interested in an overview of some of the earlier studies on this subject, you might want to read this article.

OK, it stays for a long time and is very efficient in terms of capacity, so what’s the catch?

(more…)

I had an interesting conversation with folks from Handshake, which our Career Education department chose and we are thrilled to support. It was all about “Why Handshake, how did you decide” etc. You take the word “Handshake” out and replace it with “Workday” or some other product and the same applies. I want to talk about how we do it at Wellesley with the hope that this will be useful for others. I am keenly aware that no two institutions are the same in our space and therefore the applicability may be limited!

(more…)

I have been pretty upset recently about a whole bunch of things. Here are a few!

SPAM emails and Cold-calls

The sheer number of unwanted emails that I receive daily is getting out of control. I never asked for them in the first place. The CAN SPAM Act was a welcome change in 2003 when it was passed, but many didn’t read the fine print before celebrating. It is about giving the consumers a choice to opt out! It should have given the consumers a choice to opt in instead! Companies are buying bulk email lists at ridiculously low price and mindlessly blasting emails hoping for miracles. Automated SPAM detection is always late in catching up to the tricks of the marketers, so we still see many emails in our inbox. I have tried everything from Unroll.me to unsubscribing to marking them as spam. Nothing works all the time and I hate clutter in my inbox.

Phones are a bit more manageable. I have all my work calls forwarded to Google Voice and I screen calls before taking them. Also, my Android phone now allows me to mark numbers as SPAM, thank you! At home, we are extremely happy that we signed up for NOMOROBO. Though we signed up with Do Not Call Registry very early on, over the years it has become practically useless. NOMOROBO partners with the telephone service provider to detect if several phones are being called at the same time and kills the call after a ring or two. Works beautifully. But I am sure that someone is developing a way to bypass this.

(more…)

Technology ecosystems, a complex network of interconnected systems, have formed sometimes for all the right reasons, but a lot of times to fix problems created by badly designed systems. The most recent mobile app ecosystems came about because of conscious decisions made in the  original design itself – realizing that they themselves did not have the bandwidth to provide all the possible functionalities, companies like Apple and Google created frameworks and allowed a community of developers to develop mobile apps for their platforms. In case of Apple, this is a carefully controlled process, whereas in case of Android, it is sort of free for all.

Then you have cases like a poorly designed Windows operating system that gave rise to a multibillion dollar ecosystem for protecting the operating system – virus protection and malware to name a few. And because these systems were originally not designed for the well connected environment we live in, new vulnerabilities are found on a daily basis. So, there is a whole ecosystem to protect essentially poorly designed systems!

Reporting and Business Intelligence ecosystems are mixed. The original ERP systems developers designed these systems to be handling large amounts of transactions. As a result these were data black holes and getting the data out from these systems required a complete new way of thinking. So, a badly designed system gave birth to data warehouses that are optimal for reporting. Then the limitations of reporting was realized and this gave birth to a whole new ecosystem called Business Intelligence that allows one to probe the data in real time without having to learn to write code!

The challenge we face is how best to support our community when easy access to several choices exist.

(more…)

I just got back from a couple of days in Baton Rouge, LA, attending a meeting regarding Workday Student. I will be honest and say that I did not like the location, the food and the weather (it was rainy and cloudy and in the 50’s)! Since we were constantly reminded of Safe Harbor statements, I would rather not delve into the details of what we saw and heard. But, in general terms, the student module of Workday is shaping up nicely. Some areas of it are really well developed and well thought of, but the others are “in the works”. I was pretty impressed with the progress that has been made, so I am feeling confident that we will have some of the crucial things ready for us when we plan our implementation next Fall.

During these meetings you find out a great deal. I attended a presentation on transfer articulation, close to my heart, because I wrote what we currently use at Wellesley. I feel that our process for granting transfer credits is pretty convoluted and complicated. But, after listening to the complexities of transfer articulation from some of the community colleges and state universities, I was thanking how relatively simple ours is. And even more impressive was that the presenters from Workday understood all of this and have been accommodating their needs. Since it is all configurable, we are covered! I can see how ours can be vastly simplified in Workday. (more…)

I am sure I have written about this before, so forgive me for the repetition. I landed in this country in September 1978 to do my PhD. Unlike others, I knew exactly what I wanted to work on for my thesis, so I wrote to Prof. David Beveridge at Hunter College, CUNY and he enthusiastically accepted me into his group. So, the day I arrived at Hunter, I had a desk in his lab! I was terribly homesick, hated all the smell and the strange food and despite my fellow Indian grad students trying to cheer me up with things like “How many from India get to walk on the streets on NY and look at the beautiful Empire State Building everyday?”, all I wanted to do was to finish my PhD as fast as I could and get back home.

Then, we were invited to join Prof Beveridge and family for Thanksgiving in their home in Westport, CT. I had no clue about what this was for, but the car ride was an interesting one. It was cold and all the food and drinks looked so alien to me that I hardly touched anything. I remember eating an apple and that’s about it. Regardless, I have a lot to thank for. First and foremost, I want to thank Prof Beveridge, whose support and generosity over the years is clearly a major reason for my professional success. (more…)