I know a lot of people including me are paranoid about continuous monitoring leading to an invasion of privacy. London is an extreme version of this. But here is a city which is using technology in the right way to solve and prevent crime. A very forward looking and good experiment by the City of Newark and the Mayor Cory Booker who is leading from the front.
Today’s Mint has an article on the Indian Met department purchasing Doppler weather radars from a Chinese firm. Now these radars are basically and upgraded version of the NEXRAD system being used in the USA. One of the reasons this deal is being touted as a technologically advanced one for India is the fact that this system is being used in the US currently. Coincidentally there is an article on the Slashdot front page today proclaiming that the US is about to replace the very same NEXRAD technology because it is old and deeply flawed in the eyeys of the meteriologists in US.
This again put in the context of the following comment makes the new deal an act of dumping old technology in third world countries!
“While our technical evaluation company is certainly competent, I hope they have not compromised on quality for cost,” says an IMD scientist not connected with the technical evaluation and selection of firms to supply the radars and who didn’t want to be named.
If the scientists themselves don’t trust the technical evaluation with all their knowledge, what do we make out of this purchase?
Python commit video shown below:
code_swarm - Python from Michael Ogawa on Vimeo.
Ever hear of a nuclear plant being shut down because of a software update? Well is happened. At first it looks like an update gone bad. Indeed it was a design which was flawed. A business system was used to connect to a control system which then went down because of the bad data. After reading the Slashdot article I realized the control system did the right thing by shutting down the nuclear plant in face of the bad data it received since that was the safest thing to do.
So in the end things did not turn out to be so bad after all because of the well designed control system.
I have been watching Like.com/Riya since it’s beta birth and it does seem to be a very promising technology. They started monetizing the face recognition technology with Riya.com and now they have come up with Facebook ads. Basically they recognize the product that your friend is wearing/showing it will show a similar product ad. Cool tech!
