Posts Tagged ‘AT&T’

Technology Rush & the Suffering

I was in Indianapolis attending EDUCAUSE Annual Conference last week. It was a reasonably good conference. Every year I come back and say to myself that I am going to seriously look into whether to go next year or not. I say the same this year. The conference has grown tremendously and the leadership was proud about 7000 attendees. Reminded me about admissions officers being proud of the number of applications. As always, the best part of the conference was meeting some of the colleagues. Some of the presentations I attended were interesting and so were the general sessions. This time, I also enjoyed meeting a couple of senior folks from companies with whom we either have a relationship or plan to.

I would have expected the programming to be a bit more interesting and diverse given the number of attendees. When I heard at least a couple were presenting twice, I was a bit surprised. Panels are great, but when most of the events are panels, where each presenter gets between 5 and 7 minutes to present and everyone is trying to be nice to the other presenters and therefore trying to keep to their time, it gets a bit restrictive. Now, on to the subject of my blog.

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Technology Imbalance

20140217_081311-SNOWI just came back from a road trip from our home in CT to Las Vegas. My son moved there and he needed a car so I drove with him. It was a great trip. My wife and I did an unforgettable road trip in 1984 from NY City to LA and back. The route that my son and I took to get to Vegas had a lot in common with the route that my wife and I took coming back east in 1984. The variation in the landscape from Ohio to Nevada is amazing. The most breathtaking part for me is always the transition from Colorado to Utah to Arizona and Nevada. Whereas the time scale in which the nature changes is many orders of magnitudes slower, the technology around it is changing rapidly. But then, technology is not changing as rapidly in certain places, even in this country, one of the most advanced ones in the world!

We left right after the big snow storm last thursday and the roads were pretty bad in CT as well as most of NY. Weather prediction technologies have become fairly sophisticated and we knew with fair certainty when the snow will end, so we could plan accordingly. The very first talk I gave in this country was a required  talk for all PhD students in Chemistry. The subject of the talk is required to be not directly related to Chemistry. Because of my interests in computational methods, I chose the topic of weather modeling. The models that I spoke about at that time were being developed in National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In simple terms, it involves solving complex differential equations and evaluating predictive values using advanced numerical methods. This requires prior values of many variables, dividing up the atmosphere into cubes and solving the equations within the cubes. Of course, you have to make sure that the values at the edges of the cubes are within the margin or error. Humongous number of calculations were done using the supercomputers (probably slower than the most powerful PCs of today) available then. Of course, the weather accuracy depended on how good the prior values are (these were reported by various weather stations) and how small a cube is. The smaller the cubes are, the better the accuracy can be, but it requires exponentially more computing power. Anyways, before I get carried away too much – even the simplest model in 1978/1979 required so much computer time that the predictions arrived 5 days after the weather had passed. Look where the technology has taken us now!

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Back from India – Happy 2013

Another year begins and all of our resolutions are probably in high gear. This year I have taken a couple of very reasonable and achievable resolutions (which shall remain a secret). I will report a scorecard in Dec 2013! My wife and I had a great time in India, visiting relatives and friends and making a trip to a couple of really great historical sites in Tamil Nadu & Karnataka.

The leftmost picture above is the Brihadeeswarar Temple (aka The Big Temple!) in a town called Tanjore (where I spent a considerable amount of time while going to College). This temple was built in the 11th century by a great Chola King called Raja Raja Chola and it is just a marvelous temple with so many sculptures in and around, that have been remarkably preserved – primarily because of granite construction and that the deep south was immune from invaders of other religions. This is a UNESCO World Heritage site called the Great Living Chola Temples.

We also visited the ruins of Vijayanagar empire (14th-16th century) in a place called Hampi in Karnataka. Though Hampi was a critical place in the empire’s history, the ruins there are primarily from the early 16th century. These were excavated beginning in the 70’s and declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in the mid-80’s. Near Hampi are three other historical sites, called Badami, Aihole and Pattadakal. Badami has four cave temples that have been extremely well preserved (because they are inside caves) and the sculptures there are breathtaking. They are from the 5th-7th centuries. Aihole and Pattadakal also have temples and sculptures that are from the same period. I have attached a few pictures above from these places.

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