Crazy Guide to the Internet

Posted by Alan Eustace, Senior VP, Engineering

You aren’t likely to find your standard potato battery project at the International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), a project of the Society for Science & the People. Nor will you see many forced volcano eruptions. You’re more likely to notice the 1,200 students from across the world coming together to share projects like “FDIS: A Fast Frequency Distribution Based Interpolation Search Algorithm” and “Probing for Cancer with Smart shRNA.”

In 2010, the ISEF will return to Silicon Valley, bringing talented young minds together for innovative discussions and projects in San Jose. We’re very pleased to be sponsoring this gathering, which will attract promising young minds from more than 40 nations. Since we’re committed to engaging talented minds, we will be delighted to give this global community of future scientists the chance to meet and compete. Prizes on offer include more than three million dollars in awards and scholarships, in addition to opportunities for internships and scientific field trips.

It’s no surprise that this has been called the “Olympics of science fairs” — we’re excited to see what the next generation of scientists and engineers has to offer! And you may wonder why we’re telling you about this now, since 2010 seems far off. Budding scientists who want to compete have a lot to do between now and then. Read more about the participation process.

Posted by Ayan Mandal, Product Manager, Google Finance

The UK Google Finance site, geared to investors in the UK, is now live. You can access stock prices, mutual funds, financial news, blogs, and charts, all through our easy-to-use and familiar interface. Here are some highlights:

• Search with a preference for UK companies and mutual funds.
• Google News integration – With a preference for news from British sources. The news is organized in groups by news topic, rather than listed by date, so you won’t have to scroll through multiple headlines for the same news story.
• Interactive Charts – Maps market data with corresponding news stories in a single interactive chart, so you can track news to stock performance. You can also click and drag on the charts to see different time periods, and zoom in for more detailed information.
• Front page market summary with FTSE indices and British pound exchange rates.
• Blogs – Incorporates blog postings for related company information from Google Blog Search.
• Discussion Groups – High quality discussion forums are part of the service. We have a team of folks dedicated to keeping the conversation experience free of spam and irrelevant posts.
• Portfolios – A fast and easy way for you to create and track portfolios of stocks and mutual funds in the currency of your choice.

Feel free to leave comments on this blog or send us email through the Help Center. While we can’t respond to all notes, your feedback has a huge impact on how we prioritize new features.

Posted by Andrew Hogue, Uber Tech Lead

Introducing experimental views for search results
There have been a lot of recent improvements to web search, but the appearance of results themselves has been pretty constant — 10 or so web pages in a vertical list. Frequently this is exactly the right format, but for some searches you need more options and more control. That’s why we’ve created our experimental search page to let you try out some of our newest ideas.
You may have noticed our “alternative views” experiment showcased last May. This lets you visualize your search results in new ways, and we’d like to highlight some of the features we’ve recently added.

Map view
Suppose you’re scouring the web trying to find out about math conferences happening in your state. Or you’d like to sit back and enjoy some jazz around town. This information is on the web and accessible through regular web search, but probably spread out over many sites and pages. Unless one of these pages has a map, it might be hard to visualize all the locations at once. Map view solves this problem by plotting some of the key locations contained in your web results onto a map.

After scrolling or zooming the map, try clicking on the “Update Results” button near the top left corner of the map to show more results just in the area you’re looking at.

Timeline view
Timeline view does the same thing as map view, but for dates found on the web. This includes dates of upcoming or historic events, or even biographical information — all generated automatically from your search results.

The graph across the top of the page summarizes how dates in your results are spread through time, with higher bars representing a larger number of unique dates. Click anywhere on the graph to zoom in to that particular period of time, and use the text box to the right to specify any range of years, months, or days. Much as in map view, the results below the graph emphasize the dates contained on each page.

Info view
Info view is a bit different. It doesn’t dramatically change the visualization of results; web pages are still displayed vertically as usual. Now you’ll notice a new control panel on the right side of the page:

Clicking on the different options in the panel changes the information shown below each result. Usually we show some text from the page that includes a few of the words you searched for. Now you can instead reveal text containing dates, locations, measurements, or images. For example, selecting “dates” from the control panel reveals the date of the Sputnik launch in the first result for “space exploration”:

And selecting “images” from the control panel displays some nice images from the page:

If you run a search and find many of your results are looking similar, try using info view. It may highlight the differences between results and help you select the best page for your needs.

Tell us what you think
You can opt in to the alternative views experiments so they become your main search UI — as well as try out many other new search tools — on the experimental search page. After opting in, send us feedback by clicking on the experiment name in the upper right part of the search page and selecting “Take our survey”. We’d love to hear your thoughts!

For a word that has its origins in 14^th century Anglo-French, “excellence” has done very well. One can hardly ever attend a meeting of top policy makers in business or education or science without somebody or the other raising the question, “Are we striving enough to achieve excellence in our field?” For policy makers, “excellence” is one of those unquestionable goals.

For the cult following that “excellence” enjoys among policy makers we have to thank Tom Peters and Bob Waterman and their 1982 book, “In Search of Excellence.” They were consultants at McKinsey when they wrote this book which went on to sell 3 million copies in the first four years of its existence and is believed to be the most widely held book in libraries in the United States.

Peters and Waterman observed traits that successful companies had in common. Things like a readiness to take quick action (as opposed to procrastination), a willingness to listen carefully to customers (as opposed to a take-it-or-leave-it attitude), and the discipline to “stick to their knitting” (as opposed to venturing into unrelated businesses).

These ideas seemed so stunningly obvious and something that anybody could practice that the notion for striving for excellence quickly became a corner of management thinking. It soon found its way well beyond the business world and into areas like educational and government policy making. It mattered little that in a short few years after the book came out several of these “excellent” companies ( Atari, Data General, Wang, to name a few) had collapsed financially. The search for excellence marched forward among policy makers.

The idea of searching for excellence has been around in education for a while in an equally unquestioned way. In engineering education, for example, it led to the starting of a half dozen institutions, equipping them with more and better classrooms, more and better teachers and more and better labs and you now have a half-dozen IITs that meet the criteria of “excellence.”

The search for excellence in management education led to the founding if another half dozen institutions , equipping them with more and better classrooms, more and better teachers and more and better libraries and you now have a half-dozen IIMs that meet the criteria of “excellence.”

And this was repeated in medical studies, in Design education, in Architecture and many other fields..

All this is very comforting till you start counting the “others”. The several thousand “other” engineering colleges, the two thousand “other” management schools, the several hundred “other” medical, Design and Architecture schools that have not been favored with these extra resources.

The theory of excellence works on the principle that if in a population of 100, five perform exceedingly well, the job is done. It does not pay attention to the other 95.

Maybe it is time that we set these excellence theories aside and look to the teachings of William Deming, a . philosophy that is exactly the opposite of the excellence theorists’. Up until then achieving manufacturing quality meant posting an inspector at the end of a production process to pick out the excellently produced items and send back the others to be reworked or discarded. Much like how we use tough entrance exams to select 0.5 to 1% of applicants to IITs and IIMs and forget the others.

Deming’s view was that when a production system turns out items of varying quality, we must ask “what is the variation trying to tell us about the process?” There are two parts to this variation he pointed out. The first part is intrinsic to the process.. He called these the “common causes” of variation. And the second part is because of things like an operator falling asleep on his shift or a particularly poor batch of raw material. These he called the “special causes”.

The “special causes” are relatively easy to fix and can often be fixed by the people directly involved in the production process: the worker who operates the machine needs to get a proper night sleep and not fall asleep at the machine, the man who buys the raw material needs to avoid poor batches.

The “common causes”, he said is the more insidious part of the variation of quality. They are often outside the control of workers and others directly involved in the production process and can only be fixed by those in management positions. Perhaps the product design itself is defective, maybe the operating processes are poorly defined, and maybe the working conditions are too poor.

Using Deming’s methods, Japanese auto and electronics companies learned to produce 100% of their output of high quality and with little or no rejects.

When we praise the excellence of our IITs and IIMs and a handful of other elite institutions we may merely be praising the work of pre-Deming quality control inspectors.

This is perfectly in keeping with the origins of the word “excellence.” It originates from the 14^th century Anglo-French word “excellere” which means someone or something that is much better than others. Intrinsic to it is the idea of selecting a few and not worrying about the rest.

Is it time we abandoned this search of excellence, embrace the methods of Deming and identify the “common causes” that cause such quality variations in our education system?

END

Comments welcome at ajitb@rediffmail.com

The last twelve months have been ugly for IT Services stocks. As an industry it was probably the worst performing industry in the Indian stock market. The chart below of Infosys vs. Sensex makes the point better than I can ever describe it.

Source: Bloomberg.com

Going by last year’s results for the bigger players, this deep dive was not quite deserved. If you look at revenue growth, sure there was some slowing down in growth from Infosys and Cognizant, but some of it was expected as the companies grow larger.

Source: Gridstone Research

There doesn’t seem to be anything particularly wrong with margins either. A few basis points here and there don’t make a trend.

Source: Gridstone Research

So what does the market see ahead and why is it punishing the shares of these companies so severely? I think they see three fundamental problems with the industry:

Slower growth in a maturing industry. It’s harder to grow on a large revenue base. Also, the industry is much more competitive with the global majors ramping up their offshore capability.
The coming recession. It’s still not a foregone conclusion, but if there is a recession in the US economy and perhaps globally as well, that’s bad news for the industry. I wrote about this a few weeks back. (link)
Pressure on margins due to a hardening rupee and rising wage costs. The majors should be able to get price increases to offset these effects, but competition in a low growth market can create a buyers’ market which could drag everyone’s pricing down.

Do the current prices in the market reflect the above correctly? I think it may have overdone it a bit. But the fundamental shifts are real.

If adversity is ahead for the industry, it should be interesting to see how different companies handle it. Momentum, which is what the entire industry has enjoyed so far, is a funny thing. It creates inertia. When you don’t have to change anything to grow, you sometimes forget how to effect change. That’s what worries me. IBM and Accenture are already undergoing the pain of change. They will emerge strong with a comparable offshore capability and their quiver full of market-side arrows. When it comes time for the Indian players to change, will they have the imagination and the gumption to do it?

[Since I write often about the IT Services industry and other public companies, I have added a disclosure to my “About me” page.]

Over my winter vacation trip to India we visited Chilka Lake. It’s India’s largest salt water lake and home to many migratory birds. Beautiful place. Unfortunately not very well developed for tourism (or fortunately, depending upon your perspective). Some photos follow. If anyone knows what that beautiful moth is called please leave a comment.

What does Gridstone Research do? If an Equity Analyst asks this question, the answer we give is what our home page says,

Using cutting-edge technology, Gridstone assembles, analyzes and structures unstructured company information into financial data, guidance, operational data and structured text. Information that could take hours to assemble is available at your fingertips, at our website or directly in Excel.

This describes the end-user benefit. But for those who are interested in such matters, it still doesn’t answer the question of what we actually do. To explain this, I will heavily lean upon an excellent post on ReadWriteWeb, by Alex Iskold. The post is called Top-Down: A New Approach to the Semantic Web.

Wikipedia describes the Semantic Web thus

The Semantic Web is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web in which web content can be expressed not only in natural language, but also in a format that can be read and used by software agents, thus permitting them to find, share and integrate information more easily.

The Semantic Web and associated standards like RDF and OWL are rapidly gaining visibility. But is it anywhere near where it might produce something of business value? Many commentators believe that it is going to be a long haul. Iskold outlines several challenges with what he calls the bottom-up approach to the Semantic Web in another great piece.

The biggest challenge that the Semantic Web is going to face is about what to do with all the existing content. How do the website owners justify the expense related to annotating their content with semantics? And until the content is converted, no useful applications can be built on top of it. There’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem here.

Might there be another approach then? An approach where someone or some company actually builds the technology to annotate web content with semantics. Iskold calls this the top-down approach

The essence of a top-down semantic web service is simple - leverage existing web information, apply specific, vertical semantic knowledge and then redeliver the results via a consumer-centric application.

Iskold believes that this is not only more likely to be successful in the short-term, it is already happening. He talks about Spock, a vertical search company focused on people.

Consider the vertical search engine Spock, which scans the web for information about people. It knows how to recognize names in HTML pages and it also looks for common information about people that all people have - birthdays, locations, marital status, etc. In addition, Spock “understands” that people relate to each other.

This is very similar to what Gridstone Research does, albeit in an entirely different domain – financial information.

We

Crawl the web. (the SEC website)
Recognize significant numbers (page numbers are not significant)
Understand relationships with other numbers through a taxonomy. (S&M and G&A add up to SG&A)
Understand the attributes of each number ($, millions, US GAAP, Consolidated)

Additionally, we

Recognize named entities
Understand relationships of brands, products, management to companies as well as among companies themselves (competitors, suppliers, customers)
Recognize forward-looking statements
Enable semantic search

In the last two years, we have been busy building the enabling technologies. This isn’t an easy problem to solve and there are many building blocks. But finally, all the pieces are in place. Later this month we will unveil Search on the Gridstone platform. It will be unlike anything you have seen in the Financial domain.

Watch this space.

The monsoon in Mumbai was winding down and Ganesh Chaturthi had just been celebrated when it struck me that this would be a good time to pay my respects to a man I much admire. So, on a recent bright and clear morning, on my way to work, I stopped by at Chowpatty Beach , that small stretch of sand at the start of Marine Drive that is an island of calm in hectic Mumbai.

It was nearing nine that morning and everyone other a few stragglers had finished their morning exercise walk and gone. The few men and women still lounging around the benches strewn along the edge of the beach were, I guess, folks who had no particular place to go or nothing particularly important to do. On nearby Marine Drive, cars whizzed by in both directions, Mumbaites in their usual demonic hurry to get to work.

What I’d come to see was there alright, if anything taller than I remember- nearly ten feet tall and when you add another ten feet for the pedestal it rested on , it was not easy from nearby to take the whole picture in.

There he stood, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, veteran of many a battle, forever impatient to set his country free now caught in an unhurried pose. One hand clutching a book, perhaps the Bhagwad Gita commentary that he wrote when the British incarcerated him for six long years in a tiny cell in remote jail. The other held a walking stick lightly. One foot was slightly ahead of the other as if he was setting out on a march for one of the many causes he felt so passionate about. He stood there alert as if watching carefully all who entered Chowpatty Beach. On Ganesh Chaturti day, millions pour past his watchful eye to immerse the Ganesh idol into the sea here. And as every school boy in India is taught, it was Tilak who thought up the public version of what was till then a private festival to get around a fearful British colonial government prohibition of large numbers of Indian gathering at one place. Early Ganesh processions even carried pictures of Garibaldi the unfier of Italy.

I wonder whether school children get taught nowadays why Tilak was sent for his first spell in prison. It was nearing the end of the 19^th century, Mumbai and Poona were being ravaged by plague which had spread here through merchant ships that traded with Hong Kong. The British colonial administration started forcibly removing plague victims and isolating them in “plague hospitals”. 19^th century science knew of no other solution to plague other than isolating people who already got it to prevent the disease from spreading to others. The high-handed way this isolation was done created an outcry among the population. Things came to a head when the British official in charge of this segregation effort was assassinated in Poona. Tilak was implicated, probably falsely, as a conspirator and sent to jail. All this may make Tilak look like an obscurantist who came in the way of medical progress he was far from that. In the middle of this turmoil, his newspapers in Poona were carrying up to date accounts of what Koch, the German scientist, was doing to isolate the plague virus. I wonder whether our school children are taught to make this distinction about Tilak’s actions- the nationalist who objected to the way citizens were being herded into plague hospitals and the modernist who followed eagerly the progress that science was making in finding an answer to the plague problem.

From where I stood beside Tilak I could see that Tilak’s gaze would have taken in the row of glitzy shops that have sprung up across the road on Marine Drive: a Levi jeans shop, a Renault car showroom, one for Arrow shirts, an immensely popular outlet of Café Coffee Day that is packed at all times of the day or night with young trendy, jeans-wearing college students. What would Tilak have made of all this? When he died, in 1920, it was far from clear whether or when India would wrest Independence and Tilak till his end was uncompromising in his demand for Swaraj. But he was also the man who in 1880 had co-founded an English medium school in Pune, “The New English School”, and an English language newspaper, “The Maratha” .

For that matter what would Tilak have made of what some environmentalists say- that the immensely popular Ganesh festivities that culminate in thousands of Ganesh statues being immersed in the sea cause environmental damage. The Ganesh statues were, in Tilak’s time, made of harmless clay and painted over with vegetable dyes, but present-day versions are made of plaster of paris that, environmentalists say, contains gypsum, sulphur, phosphorus and magnesium and are painted over with chemical paints that contain mercury, cadmium, lead and carbon.

Tilak, ever the modernist, would probably have led another movement, this time at the head of the environmentalists who suggest that permanent idols made of brass or stone be used, that a symbolic immersion be done so that the same idol could be used again the next year and oppose the use of thermocole and plastic in decorations. And, ever the great activist, he may have carefully watched the immersions from his vantage point at Chowpatty to make sure that these socially important directions are followed.

Comments welcome at ajitb@rediffmail.com

It is early January here in New York and the weather had no right to be as warm and sunny as it is today. By any account it has to be freezing and below zero Celsius and the streets have to be speckled with dirty, melting snow puddles. These pigeons that we see hopping along in the square ought to be hiding from the cold in a warm nook of some building. The streets are bustling with people. This is not a sight for early January. People ought to be indoor and the streets ought to wear the deserted January look.

I find myself strolling back from lunch with a prominent technology guru of a prominent Wall Street bank.

“I have finally figured out what ‘one lac’ means,” he had said to me.

“How come?” I asked, genuinely surprised. There have many things I have tried explaining about India to our western friends, but not our numerical system of ‘lacs’ and ‘crores’. I thought we had left that safely behind in favour of ‘hundreds of thousands’ and ‘millions’. The term ‘lac’ had seemed so archaic. But here it was, back in the world’s headlines with the ‘Rupees One Lac car” from the Tatas.

“I believe what the Tata’s are unveiling today, their Rs one lac car, is going to change the way the world looks at Indian companies,” my tech guru friend had said.

“When the Indian software industry, made its mark,” he had continued, “the rest of the world had understood how they did it; Indian programmers were a tenth as expensive as programmers in the West. Then the Indian rupee steeply devalued from Rs 8 per dollar in the mid-1980’s to Rs 45+ per dollar in the mid 1990’s making the cost competitiveness case even more compelling. But the Rs 1 lac car is different. They will get to this target not by using cheaper labour or cheaper materials available only in India. They are going to get to this by bringing into play product design skills, consumer insights, management systems, perhaps even a new business design. In other words, they are going to compete on capabilities not resources. That’s why it is sending a shudder down the spine of many Western executives, not just car industry executives.”

As I walked back to my office my mind strayed to other such moments in industrial history.

Take, for instance, Richard Arkwright’s successful effort in the early part of the 19^th century to make machines spin yarn of a quality equal to or better than that spun by skilled, hand spinners in India. His innovation made yarn cheaper and thus made cotton cloth woven from it affordable not merely by the very wealthy and it had been till then. What Arkwright did was not save labor costs by using machines instead of labour because any such savings were more than offset by the cost of equipment and factory buildings… His real innovation was in the design of work such that workers would all congregate at a fixed place of work (a “factory”) and thus work for predictable hours and under tight supervision as opposed to working odd hours at home. Superior work organization allowed output to be dramatically increased and made cotton yarn widely available, a feat that home-based spinners could not achieve. The rise of the Western world was predicated first on this idea- the use machines to do at one central place what hitherto human muscle power had done in decentralized home based activity. Then came the use of chemistry to make synthetically and in plenty materials that had been hitherto available in nature in restricted quantities and in varying quality levels and consequentially at higher prices. Thus indigo from India was synthetically produced and became available in vast quantities and at a fraction of the price of natural indigo; aspirin, hitherto distilled from the bark of willow, was similarly synthesized and millions of ordinary citizens benefited.

Henry Ford created another revolution when he launched his Model T car and brought cars within the reach of ordinary people. He did this by deploying “mass production” techniques- a new system of arranging a sequence of metal working machine which did repetitive operations reliably and which could be supervised by the illiterate, unskilled immigrant labor coming off the impoverished farms of Ireland and Southern Italy- the only kind of labour available to him at that time. Ford’s “big idea’, mass production, then got deployed in a wide variety of metal working industries and made such objects like the sewing machine and bicycles affordable by all.

The “big idea” behind the Rs 1 Lac Tata car is this- an Indian company, has dreamt up a management system and a business design to build cars that are affordable by people who had never dared dream of owning a car..

The real message of the Rs 1 Lac car is that in one stroke, it is showing the way to Indian managements that a new era awaits- one where you compete on superior management capability leaving behind decades of attempting to compete on cheaper labour or cheaper natural resources.

Its like the early coming of spring after a long cold winter.

End