Idle ramblings of a wandering mind...

India's growth story, especially in Software and Telecom is well known. Here is a not so well known and very encouraging facet of Indian economy: India has substantial Wind Power generation capacity and its growing rapidly. India now has world's fourth largest wind power generation capacity. Look at the table below:


The most encouraging part is the really high growth rate. Having worked in India's power sector, I know how bad the power situation is in India and this is about the only good news in this industry.

Its interesting to note that Indian industry is taking a technology leadership role in Wind Power. Suzlon is scaling up fast and delivering integrated Wind Power projects in even US and Australia. Suzlon recently bought Hansen Transmissions in a $565 million deal that will see it emerge as one of largest integrated wind power companies in the world. Market seems to like Suzlon's moves - considering its amazing $8.4 billion valuation (making its owner Tulsi Tanti a billionaire by a distance). Suzlon now offers wind towers with 2 MW capacity each - thats huge!

I guess this is one of the positive offshoots of the recent oil price increase. As oil gets costly, alternate power generation sources will become more attractive. Wind power is one of the more viable technologies and I am happy to see India taking a lead in this space.

Labels: Alternative Energy, India, Wind Power

   

I was looking around for World Military Spending - and found the data at the CIA World Factbook. I did a little poking around and interesting facts came out from the data. Look at the table below. I list top 20 countries in the order of their defence expenditures (in billion USDs) and then I calculate their defence spending as a percentage of world total.


Things that jump out straight:

• US spends almost half the world's total defence expenditure!! USD 518 billion - thats more than the entire GDP of Africa. The enormity of this amount is astounding - this is like about 100 dollars for every person in the world - every year!! And we thought the cold war, the nuclear race and all the crazy things were over!
• Look at the countries US is in potential conflict with - Iran and North Korea - they do not even figure in the top 20 countries!! Where is the justification for US asking these countries to scale down their defence programs when US itself spends more than 500 billion on defence.
• China spending 81 billion and India spending 19 billion are out of line too. Both these countries are developing, with millions in extreme poverty - and here they are spending so much on defence.

My impression is that the enormous US defence establishment (including the political and administrative extensions) has become self-sustainable. US is spending so much money not because it needs to but because its tied to so many people's self-interest.

When I think of the Iraq situation, I find it amusing that we have American soldiers with salaries and benefits totalling perhaps more than 100,000 USD per year are trying to keep peace in Iraqi villages, which would not have total income of 100,000 USD for the entire village put together. If they had just given the cost of peacekeeping to Iraqi people - they would have been much better off and would probably have taken cared of their own situation much better themselves.

Everybody's life is invaluable - but from a pure economic point of view, American soldiers don't make sense. How about outsourcing the work to Indian or Pakistani soldiers (leaving aside the political complications for a moment)? They are cheaper to employ and they have extensive experience of peacekeeping in similar contexts as Iraq (Indians in Kashmir, Pakistanis in Karachi and these days in Afghanistan border). Of course the idea would not fly in the current political scenario - but I think the future trend for American military is clear. They should focus on being the Command and Control and the Equipment army and they should collaborate with developing countries as the people army. This is a win win for both for taking care of all international assignments.

Labels: India, US

   

UPDATE

My teaching schedule has changed and I will now be teaching BIT 311 - Decision Support with Excel during the Spring 2006 term. Here is a description of the course:

Spreadsheets are among the most widely used decision support tools in business today, and have advanced to the point of providing powerful, general-purpose functionally. The first half of the course introduces decision support modeling using spreadsheets, including: what-if analysis; financial, statistical, and time/date functions; graphical presentation of data; organizing and extracting information from spreadsheet databases; and cross-tabulation of data. The second half of the course includes importing information into spreadsheets from external sources; goal seeking; one and two way data tables; the use of a solver to find optimal solutions to problems; designing macros to develop semi-automated and fully automated spreadsheet applications; and probabilistic modeling to support risk analysis in the context of spreadsheets. Lecture/demonstrations illustrate the features of spreadsheet software. Lab work involves carrying out hands-on tutorials in a supervised setting, then reinforcing and extending conceptual and operational aspects of the material by doing follow-on cases. Windows-based spread-sheeting software (such as Excel for Windows) is typically studies in the course.


I am finally scheduled to teach BIT 301 during the coming Spring Term (May-June 2006). I am very excited to have this opportunity to teach.

I was asked what the course is about and I wrote a small paragraph detailing my broad conceptualization of the course. Here it is:

The course focuses on introducing students to Information Technology and Information Systems in Business. The course has two main components - the first introduces students to the big picture of technology in organizations and how businesses leverage technology for competitive advantage. The second part focuses on providing the tools and skills needed for students to succeed in a technology rich workplaces. These tools and skills include Spreadsheets (Excel), Databases (Access) and Website Design and Usability. The first component will be mostly case based teaching while the second component will have extensive lab sessions. This course will be particularly useful for LSA and Engineering students looking to get a better understanding of business and technologies that enable and influence business. The skills part of the course will be particularly valuable to anybody looking for a corporate internship or job offers as Excel/Access/Web skills are required almost everywhere these days.

I will be detailing out various aspects of the course in coming days - including finalizing the syllabus and preparing the coursepack. I am a little concerned that there might not be enough demand for the course during the Spring Term (who wants to study in Spring/Summer :-) - but I am hoping that I would be able to get enough students to be able to run the course successfully.

Labels: Teaching

   

My paper titled "Metrics to Support Open Source Software Adoption Decisions" has been accepted at AMCIS 2006 Conference. The conference will be held at Acapulco, Mexico from Aug 4 to Aug 6 2006. AMCIS is the largest conference in Information Systems area and I am excited to be able to participate in it. Following is the abstract of the paper:

Open Source Software (“OSS”) is gaining popularity and the number of available OSS products is rapidly increasing. Increasingly business managers need to evaluate and select OSS products for adoption. However, OSS adoption presents unique risks and there is a need for metrics to assess these risks. In this research-in-progress we leverage publicly available OSS project information such as source code and CVS database to build a suite of metrics to help managers evaluate OSS products and assess OSS adoption risks. We also provide real project examples for calculation and interpretation of these metrics.

Essentially the paper says that managers face many challenges unique to OSS while making OSS adoption decisions. We argue that many of these challenges can be effectively assessed and mitigated using publicly available data about OSS products. OSS is unique in its transparency and willingness to provide all information to everybody. We argue that this aspect of OSS can be leveraged to effectively counter many unique challenges presented by OSS adoption decisions. This was an RIP (research-in-progress) submission and so had to be within the 2500 word limit. Consequently, many important details have been left out from the paper to abide by the word limit. We are planning to present a significantly expanded version in the AMCIS 2006 Conference. If you would like to read the full paper - drop me a line and I would be happy to send it to you.

I am so thrilled. This would be my second conference presentation after the WISE workshop last year. As an ending note, we can't finish a post about FLOSS without taking a dig at Windows - so here goes one:

Labels: Conference Presentations, FLOSS, Research

   

I came across this remarkable story of Addwaita, the Aldabra giant tortoise in the Kolkata Zoo in a column by Ardeshir Cowasjee in Pakistan's leading newspaper - Dawn. I have been a regular reader of Cowasjee's column (the other two regular Dawn columnists Ayaz Amir and Irfan Hussain are great too). Its interesting that I came across an story of deep significance for India, in a Pakistani newspaper.

Coming back, Addwaita was one of four Aldabra tortoises brought to India in 18th century. They were gifted to Robert Clive, one of the first influential East India Company officers. Three of the tortoise died soon after and only Addwaita survived. Addwaita continued to live in Clive's garden, before being moved to the Calcutta Zoo in 1875. Here is a picture of Addwaita from Yahoo News:



After living a long life of 256 years (estimated birth year 1750, another estimate puts it at 1705, giving Addwaita an age of 301 years at death), Addwaita died in March 2006. Imagine that Addwaita saw India's entire freedom struggle with his own eyes. He saw the growth of British Empire and its eventual decline. Addwaita was witness to Mahatma Gandhi's thoughts and work... he saw the India's first uprising in against the British in 1857 and then even saw India's new IT revolution :-) Its so satisfying for me to think that one conscious being lived through all this history in making. The sad part is that he is no more with us and I did not even come to know about him while he was alive!

Since I came to know about Addwaita I have done some more research on Aldabra Giant Tortoise (Wikipedia Article). The most heartening thing to note is that their natural habitat in Aldabra Atoll in Seychelles is protected from human influence. They are prospering there (population more than 150,000) and live in a unique ecosystem.

Labels: India

   

Little things make the difference between a crappy day and a day of celebrations!! Today one such little thing happened - My Google Page Rank is no longer zero!! While it does not seem like much to many - I am ecstatic...

You can check my Page Rank in a little button in the right side menu. My Google Page Rank is moving between 3 and 4, depending upon which page you are looking at. Also - the mirror of this blog in umich.edu has higher Page Rank than the Blogger mirror. I guess Google does not have as much faith on its own company!!

Anyways - this gives me more motivation to continue posting...

Labels: Blog