My Memoir

Here is some thought process that has always been going on subtly in my mind, recently sped up by some articles
by NR Murthy, Dr. Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and R.A Mashelkar on the importance of research in India.

As Mr.Murthy had pointed out, India’s health definitely depends on the state of scientific research in the country. When all the developing nations are aiming at promoting fundamental research, where do we stand ? This piece of statistics was an eye-opener: “Although India produces about 400,000 engineering graduates and about 300,000 computer science graduates every year, just about 20,000 master’s degree holders and fewer than 1,000 Ph.Ds in engineering graduate each year.” “In 2007 China had 1,423,000 researchers, second internationally to the United States, which had almost 1,571,000. India by comparison had 154,800. India’s spend on R&D in 2007-08 was about US$ 24 billion compared with China’s investment of about US$ 104 billion back in 2006 and the United States’ US$ 368 billion.” India has produced less
quality research after 1950 compared to before-1950(an era of people like C.V.Raman, G.N Ramachandran and
others).

This reduction in number of post graduates and Ph.D graduates not only affects the quality of research. It also affects the capability and even availability of teachers. It affects the kind of job we do everyday, in every industry, especially IT. It is evident that most of the engineering students are going to the job market and staying there, quite complacent. Nor is the IT industry in India supporting research.(Ofcourse, how many of us here are Ph.Ds ?) Most part of innovations by all technology and product companies are done in U.S or Europe. But how long are we going to serve as cost cutting centers, majorly ? But the important question, where is the recognition ? How much does this government encourage post graduation which would lure students away from the job market towards research ? India’s low numbers in research work amounts to to lack of infrastructure in Institutions, lack of recognition, politicization and commercialization of education, and our very own crippled method of scientific education.

Investing a lot more money is not a panacea. (Especially in a country where approximately only 30% of the money
being allocated for a particular plan reaches the beneficiaries). What do we have to do ? Venky says “Embed research institutes within universities, so students have a direct experience of first class research from a very early stage”.
We will have to get over “bookish education methods.” Students should not be encouraged to just cram up for exams. Encourage students to think out of the box. Conduct more national level competitions that promote research oriented thinking among students. Create an “ecosystem of innovation” , where questioning attitude is encouraged. Students should be encouraged to study basic sciences and do fundamental research. And the most important of all, Pay researches world class salary.

We have lots of challenges to face as a country in promoting research. As Mashelkar says “The potential Ramans and Ramanujams are there even today somewhere. We need to find them early enough”. And if we do, we will not have to be just proud of Indian researchers working in other countries making miracles. We will have handful of people working in India who will bring Nobel prizes eventually.

I had a bad time using TEDIT (an old full screen block mode editor)with minimal features.So I was typing programs in a linux machine(emacs) and transferring it to a Nonstop system.

My manager helped me in finding this emacs port for nonstop.

http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/TrampMode

Hope it helps others as well.

here are details about the tech talk Angelo Rajadurai an alumnus from Sun gave us on 29th July.

http://blogs.sun.com/krithika

Here are the pictures,,

here is a software that i found out after some googling , to recover data which got deleted accidentally (may be pictures , songs ). As i had to search for such a software to recover the deleted pics in a mobile,

http://www.freedownloadscenter.com/Utilities/Disk_Maintenance_and_Repair_Utilities/Stellar_Phoenix_Digital_Media_Recovery.html

seems to be cool , but i got to pay for it

I was quite amazed to read about unununium a new OS which aims at running all processes in the same address space without seperate kernel and user spaces…ie no single part of it lies in the main memory always.Well it also increases interconnection between components…The OS will not be a set of applications anymore rather a set of components which can be interconnected by any pattern , they say “Why can I not use my favorite text editor to edit text input fields on a webpage? The notion that an application is a “box”, and this application may use “libraries” but not other “applications” is absurd. “

It is more interesting that they use Python for implementing this…