Debasis And Associates-Collective Musings

Air-cover: Innovation's secret ingredient

2011-12-31T20:23:00.000+05:30

Bill Fischer has written about how innovation can flourish in organizations (see his latest book The Idea Hunter (co-authored with Andy Boynton),Jossey-Bass, 2011). You need a great team that can work freely. That is a necessity. But, what he finds as more important is to protect this team from the day to day problems and the usual business related stress and strains. Someone with enough

Observations about Academia

2011-12-27T22:22:00.001+05:30

I met a principal of an engineering college in Hyderabad. We got to talking. The topic turned to evaluation of faculty members. I have several posts on how, in the present way of administering things, you cannot reward good performance of teachers. Having worked in industry for a long time, rewarding performance is something routine and one of the best tool to encourage someone to give his/her

Another Seminar and Some Observations About Academia

2011-12-27T22:05:00.000+05:30

I was at a place named Sirhind in Punjab on 16 th. and 17th Dec. There was a seminar about the role of regulatory bodies in higher education. That is a significant issue. I presented a paper on " Technological Changes Impacting Teaching-learning processes". This talked about some significant changes happening in technology related to education. To me, the most significant thing is the changes now

China Advancing on Their Navigation Setup

2011-08-02T15:18:00.000+05:30

The eighth of the 35 constellation Beidou system went up on the 27 of July. This is a sure sign of China's determination of creating a navigation set up all of their own. This will take a complete break from the familiar GPS system. The system should be complete and star its international operation by 2020, as claimed by the Xinhua. China launches navigation satellite: Xinhua

OMAP4470 Will Power Smarter Smartphones

2011-08-02T14:50:00.001+05:30

Users keep demanding more and more power on their smartphones. They would expect ever smarter apps to run on these devices. The processors have started to become multicore in the process. Over the years the user interface experience has become an important feature required in smartphones. That has driven graphics capability into the processor core.With the blowing up of video demand, it is

Reinventing the book

2011-06-11T19:41:00.001+05:30

This too is for academics, general readers too. Books, as we know them, is changing completely! Possibilities are immense. This article looks at some of them as is happening and as is evident from the BookExpo end May! For one thing, the possibilities of combining multi-media has not really been applied completely. I feel very excited in thinking about just how it can be used for making the

Take engineering education in context - 2011-04-21 10:00:00 | EDN

2011-06-10T07:14:00.000+05:30

This piece is for everyone involved in engineering practice. The article I have cited below brings out a major issue in how engineering is taught everywhere. Dr. Kevin C Craig mainly criticizes how in the engineering curriculum we teach skills in isolation and very little attention is paid to "playing the game". By playing the game he compares it with training of a baseball player where a rookie

What is the Potential Impact of Tablet Computers on Education

2011-06-08T20:03:00.002+05:30

While this article talks about how education might be affected, it is interesting to look at the question in general. 7 inch handheld tablets, or similar form factor e-Readers seem to have the potential in education similar to what the slated brought in a while back! HP calls their tablets "slates" possibly to raise that image in the minds of buyers. To my mind an eReader and a tablet as a

The college essay - ASPIRE™

2011-06-08T07:03:00.001+05:30

This is for my dear students who just went out into this wide open world, even for some of you coming into the fourth year. Either way this is for students who want to pursue their studies in US/UK and such countries. One of the major requirements for all applications to the admission committees of the universities. This is an excellent article on why such an essay( also known as SOP or statement

Intel Announced Oak Trail But Will It Lead To El Dorado!

2011-06-06T20:22:00.001+05:30

The El Dorado of the mobile phone and tablets that is! Intel missed the boat in this marketplace. The mobile space seems to be growing all the time. The smartphone and the tablets are growing the way no other device has grown before. Everything seems to be going to the various variants of the ARM architecture.This Oak Trail announcement, about a month or so back, announced this family of devices.

Samsung 2GHz dual-core smartphone processor

2011-06-06T19:56:00.000+05:30

2 core processors for the mobile space are breaking out all over. What that means is smart phones are going to get smarter and, more interestingly, closer to a PC. While smart phone are more of a phone with lots of other capabilities through apps, PCs are more of general computing capabilities that may have some communications capabilities. What is when a unified device is going to appear! I'll

Super 30 founder to start school! - Yahoo! India Education

2011-06-03T20:17:00.000+05:30

Super 30 founder to start school! - Yahoo! India Education

Hands-on with the iPad 2

2011-06-01T21:59:00.000+05:30

This link refers to a visual tour of the new (then, back in Mar) iPad2. So definitely take a look at the slides, pictures do speak a thousand words. Looks nice and handy and in the white version like a slate! This device is available in white and black. With the original iPad it was " you can have any color, as long as it is black!" You can hold it one hand comfortably as it is significantly

Eight free Windows 7 tools

2011-06-01T10:17:00.002+05:30

I don't know if these are really the top free applications. But the suggestion in this article from Infoworld do look interesting and hence I am pointing out to my readers too. These applications are, in no particular order, evernote, desktops, FastStone photo resizer, easy duplicate file finder, teamviewer, dropbox, clip training and AllMyApps. They are all free so, there is no stake in trying

Glonass-K Satellite Available By Year End

2011-06-01T07:36:00.000+05:30

Glonass set up, Russia's answer to the US GPS system is nearly complete with 22 of required constellation of 24 satellites required for a fully operational system. The balance two should go up by the 3rd quarter of this year. Like the GPS this system too will have both military and civilian use and will provide accuracy for civilian use withing a few meters. Receivers have started to appear in

Open code is irrelevant to Android's success

2011-05-31T07:26:00.000+05:30

Put differently, open code or not Android is going to succeed. iPad uses iOS and it is entirely proprietary and has very large community of developers are developing apps for the platform, Similarly, though Google said Android will be open source, the strategy seems to develop versions of the OS and then make the source available to big partners not to all comers though. The way Android has gone

iPad 2 announcement-Reviews

2011-05-30T21:56:00.001+05:30

iPad 2 announcement created quite a buzz. Most like the iPad 2 too. We have already covered one that likes Motorola Xoom. Basically the issue comes down to iPad is real, it is here. What really matters is how soon other competitive products can come out and offer a better price/ performance spot. With iPad and Xoom offering 2 cameras and powerful graphics power, every one of the competitor will

Apple's iPad 2 Launched in Early Mar

2011-05-30T21:54:00.000+05:30

iPad was a huge phenomenon. iPad 2 has followed soon. Steve Jobs came back from medical absence to launch the product. It is certainly better. According to Job's estimate the new dual core A5 has double the performance and something like 9 times graphics capability from the earlier version. That is a huge improvement. In a post in the recent past we have seen how the Motorola Xoom might be better

Motorola Xoom versus the iPad 2

2011-05-29T19:49:00.000+05:30

According to this blog item in Computerworld, the Motorola Xoom is better than iPad. Originally the writer compared the Xoom with the original iPad on eight counts. Even when iPad came out he finds that the Xoom is still better! While jury is still out on which is really better, quite often the arguments border on religious fervor, we'll have to wait and see what wins in the market. The

One More Batch of Students Pass Through Our Portals

2011-05-29T15:50:00.003+05:30

When I was looking around my facebook page, one of our last year's student came up and we had a chat.I suddenly realized how fast one whole year have passed. Right now we are in the middle of that phase where the 2011 pass out have completed their exams and over the last couple of days been leaving the campus. Last year the placement scene was bad and this guy I was chatting with, had to go over

Mobile World Congress: The new front in the processor battle | ZDNet

2011-03-28T15:12:00.001+05:30

Mobile world congress took place in Feb. looks like the next generation processors are coming out from a whole range of manufacturers. With smartphones demanding powerful applications, with demand for some of the productivity applications on the go, the phones are looking more like a computer. The mobile computing may finally be here. Besides there is a lot of activity in the Tablet space. More

Texas Instruments To Launch Feature-Rich, ARM-Based Mobile OMAP 5 Processors

2011-03-28T13:50:00.000+05:30

According to this news item, these chip samples are going to be available by the second half of this year.These ARM based processors are directed at the mobile space and possibly brings the mobile computing closer to reality. The OMAP 5 packs a lot of processing power and is a significant improvement over the OMAP4.The new chip will have dual ARM Cortex A15 cores, running at 2 GHz. These are

Windows 8 on ARM SoC, Phone 7 updates, tablets

2011-02-11T14:39:00.002+05:30

With the Windows 8 MS is going to give you a version for the ARM based processors. That creates an ARM based PC making opportunity. Similarly does it create an opportunity for the MS behemoth to move into the mobile space that they entirely missed! Can elephants dance! may be not but they can run at 40 KMPH when needed, is this an occasion, we would see MS hitting the ground running! I have

Freescale offers take on tablets, 3-D units

2011-02-11T14:31:00.000+05:30

The microprocessor company Freescale takes a look at the future and predicts what kind of processors would be required. They aim to have them ready when the time comes. As described in this news release, their Director of global consumer marketing feels there are four trends visible. One is that future tablets are going to provide augmented reality. For example, you may be standing near a shop in

Striving For A Competitive CPU And Platform Edge

2011-02-10T18:32:00.001+05:30

Brian Dipert expounds on Sandy Bridge here.The product roadmap, mobile variations, the new micro-architecture and so on. Read for all the details. But, the Sandy Bridge has suffered a set back already. The chipset helping design processor based systems turned out to have faults in them. There has been a product call back. Thus the road map talked about here is likely to slip somewhat. Intel's