The Official Blog of Ranganathan Sankaralingam (We Have No Branches)

The grinch who stole $3.99

If a non-profit sends people to do giftwrapping, Amazon will give the charity 60-75 cents per package. Amazon charges the customer $2.99-$5.99 per giftwrapping.

It sounds borderline unethical to me.

I found this interesting aside in an article linked from reddit:

And there’s the scary, unsexy truth about search, the one you’ll never read about in a search engine’s top-10 list: Most people aren’t really searching. They’re using search engines as navigation, typing website names or even URLs into the search box that automatically pops up in their browser.

I know that many the “search” feature of many websites simply reproduces canned results for popular searches [E.g., "live" on Microsoft]. I would not be surprised if “real” search engines were doing the same.

The Hindu has an article titled “Labour shortage affects industries in Erode” which states that owners of industrial units are finding it difficult to find workers for their blue-collar positions. One owner went 1000 km away to Bihar and Orissa to find workers.

They give two reasons:

1. Workers are not interested in more work for more more pay. Once a worker earns decides he’s earned “enough” in a day, he is not interested in working any more that day.
2. People are becoming more educated, and once educated, they do not want blue-collar jobs.

Or maybe it’s just that the wages being offered are too low.

Today, I bumped into the full-text version of the book “Almost Perfect”, a history of WordPerfect by following random Wikipedia links. I read this book many years ago and found it very interesting. The guy has a plain, straightforward, and engaging style. Highly recommended. [Btw, here is a less-than glowing review].

If you read this book hoping to learn more about running a business, then I hope you noted the parts about teaching correct principles and allowing employees to govern themselves. In spite of the problems I had understanding and implementing this philosophy, I am convinced it is the best way to run a business. In today’s competitive environment, businesses can no longer afford the overhead of one supervisor for every five or six employees. As organizations flatten and supervision decreases, employees will make more decisions on their own and govern themselves much more than they have in the past. If a company is to function effectively, its employees must have a good understanding of what is expected of them. Very small organizations may be able to find success without defining and teaching correct principles, but any business with more than 25 or 30 people must get organized. [emphasis mine]

The guy’s grit, determination, and self-confidence are inspiring. What a comeback! I hope he leads India to victory in the World Cup.

Here is the short and succint appeal for redress. It appears to be a grassroots effort. Here’s the Nation’s article about the soldiers’ call for withdrawl.

A common theme in the soldiers’ comments is that they feel they were “brainwashed” [sic] by the government and feel betrayed. Education and economic opportunity for all has created thinking people who will not kill out of ignorant malice or economic necessity. Coercion (conscription) is out for the foreseeable future [how to filter out potential troublemakers?].

What will The Man do now?

I predict autonomic robotic soldiers in 20 years. Robots have no feelings. One person can control lots of them.

Who cares about whether the inaccurate first generation robots kill more than humans? Each war in history has been bloodier than the last.

And robots will be far more expensive than humans. All the better for the military industrial complex.

The Man always finds a way.

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Free cooking gas scheme from Bhogi day in Tamilnadu.

I would like to hear more specifics, but it sounds like a good idea to me. This will result in some infrastructure creation in the more remote areas.

The smoke from cooking in a wood stove is as harmful as smoking cigarettes. The smoke inhaled from cooking is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes (20 cigs) per day. If this improves women’s health, more power to them.

If this is done without increasing government staff, just by redeploying them, then it’s quite a smart move. Since you can’t fire govt staff (in order to maintain social stablity), it’s best to come up with methods like this to use them.

Looks like he got away for a long using his connections. I hope the Supreme Court puts him away for a long time. But I am cynical. He’ll probably get away this time too.

Outlook magazine’s timeline.

What I really want to read are novel web pages (e.g., that Not My Job photo). Why? Because being exposed to novelty causes brain expansion.

Digg/Reddit/Slashdot/Delicious/Metafilter/Kuro5hin all assume that many novel articles will get submitted. The second key assumption is that readers will moderate up novel articles from this pool. Then showing the articles with the most votes results in a front page filled with novel articles. How exciting!

But readers also tend up moderate up popular articles, i.e., articles that deal with topics that are popular at the moment, but not necessarily novel (e.g., some new Nintendo rumour).

Since front page space is limited, popular articles may receive many more votes than novel articles. While these novel articles languish, popular articles rise to the top (imagine cream sinking instead of rising).

I call this the “tyranny of the masses”. A PC way to put it is that these sites need to find a way to balance novelty and popularity.

I am 100% certain that an automatic algorithm can be created to sift the novel articles from the Internet. The ingredients I would put in the secret sauce are:

1. Crawl all the RSS feeds on the web. Build up a database of articles. If the article is not linked in any RSS feed anywhere, assume it’s neither novel nor popular.
2. Check if the article has been dugg, posted to reddit, etc.
3. Check what Technorati has to say about it.
4. Many of these sites provide RSS feeds that can be used to really deeply analyze the voting behaviour on a per-user basis.
5. Scan the keywords in the articles.
6. Scan the keywords in the comments (if there are any comments).
7. Use the above to figure out which articles are only popular but not novel.
8. Don’t display these articles.

Is it safe? via metafilter. I am still not sure if this is a joke or not.

Pizza purchased hot on Wednesday night and kept in the fridge till Friday….Good to eat? Chicken, green peppers, onion and mushroom. Help me hive mind before I implode with hunger!