It Figures (Cricinfo blog with statistical analysis) sometimes does publish good analysis and articles. But this one on consistency index, has too many flaws.

Not convincing at all. What they have calculated is simply call the co-efficient of variance in statistics. Again, as long as you were calling it a consistency index, it probably was acceptable. But the moment they equated it to "greatness" or the measure of how good a batsman was, the analysis became quite unnecessary.

Anyway, the coefficient of variance only measures the dispersion of the data, but should ONLY be used with ratio scales. Cricket batting scores are ordinal scale.

Jurong Point has been drastically expanded (to more than double its previous space). I was lost and amazed by the number and variety of stores that have opened up.

Action City - Japanese innovation - mouse wrist supports that look like a donuts and marshmallows; head massagers in the shape of pokemon or a folded arm; lots of USB based toys and devices �?? lights, photo albums, missile launchers; etc etc. This shop at the basement of JP1 portion of the mall, is a wonderland. You cannot come out of this shop without buying something �?? buy something at least to show your respect for Japanese Innovation.

If you have studied in NTU, or resided in the Jurong West, you will know the importance of JP (Jurong Point). The new JP (JP1 + JP2), is 3 times larger, and 10 times better.

NTUC is now called Fairprice Extra �?? and extra it is �?? more space, more merchandise and more choice.

The new LRT line (from Boon Lay to NTU) is almost ready. Bet where NTU students are going to spend their time on weekends!!

Given the immense talent pool that India has, 11 positions at the top most rung are not enough any more. We have Jaffer, Rohit, Pujara, Raina, Uthhapa, Jadeja etc who have been consistently performing at the Ranji level. Their performances in the current Ranji season deserve attention. India ought to split, and have two teams playing at the top level.

Cricinfo has been slightly behind in providing good RSS feeds from the amazing content they produce. There is a lot of interesting content that never reaches the front page of Cricinfo.

Recently they have introduced a feature that allows creating news feeds for almost anything on the site.

The key URL for this is http://content-www.cricinfo.com/rss/content/feeds/news/[objectID].xml

Navigate to any search result, player page, or topic. Copy the object ID from the Navigation URL and add the feed to your aggregator. I have created feeds for Indian Domestic Competitions (which just got hotter with TN, UP, MUM and SAU making it to the semi finals of the Ranji Trophy).

And of course there is the feed for news about SRT [object ID 35320].

Bought this at Sitex2008, Expo yesterday. Very cool, though a little expensive at S$89.

Created using only 36 random photos from Pykara Falls (Ooty).

Hard Core Bhojpuri - seen on a hoarding in Kozhikode (Calicut), Kerala. It means "How are you?".

The image below - there were posters of this guy all over Ooty (Tamil Nadu). I am sure he is one of the actor-turned-politicians.

Picasa Web just launched their "NameTag" feature which automatically detects faces and categorizes them in the entire album. The user interface to browse through the detected faces and for tagging is very intuitive. The face detection and categorization engine is very accurate.

This functionality along with GeoTagging, which Picasa already provides, fulfils the typical user requirements for photo sharing and management.

User Interface for tagging: The interface is very neat and easy to use.

1) A carousel with the lead face from a face category allows easy navigation to a particular person. For that face, the user can then select/deselect particular pictures and assign a "name".

2) The selection of name has 3 different modes -

a) selection from a suggested list (picasa's guess of who the person is based on previously assigned names),
b) selection from a list of contacts existing in either GMail or in Picasa Contacts,
c) and creation of a new contact.

Selection from Picasa's guess -

When it is difficult to identify the person without seeing the entire photo, Picasa allows viewing the picture in an AJAX popup.

3) Undo and "Merge" people functionality is very useful when correcting tags

Face Detection: BRILLIANT!

1) They are able to detect faces from even low quality and dark pictures

2) The categorization is able to group together the faces over a long period of time, irrespective of the person's age in the photo. The photos below span a period from 1980-1990, and still the algorithm was able to match it to the right person (my dad) who has changed a lot since.

3) The auto suggest for names (based on previously tagged faces) is correct 80-90% of the times

4) The auto-suggest of names usually suggests names that are somehow genetically related - which is very interesting - the algorithm finds faces to be very similar within a family

In the following picture, the face shown is a sibling of the name suggested as the closest guess by Picasa, considering this picture was taken about 20 years ago, the matching is amazing.

Even when there are errors in the auto-suggest, most of the times - one of the suggested names is the right one. A lot of times, the faces (even a whole category) are suggested to be a sibling.

In the set below, the 3 faces belong to "Nishith" (second suggestion), who is a sibling of "Anshuman" (the top suggestion).

5) The "Find More" feature works well when one wants to tag for a specific few people in the entire album