Today in Tech: Internet blackouts; Placements in new IITs; Eric Schmidt's new book

NS Ramnath
Updated: Dec 4, 2012 12:42:53 PM UTC

Internet blackouts

In the light of internet blackouts in Egypt and Syria, Gizmodo asks how prone countries are prone to blackouts and tries to answer in the number of internet providers a country has. The more you have, the less prone you are to a black out. This is what it says about the group that India falls under: If you have more than 10 internationally-connected service providers, but fewer than about 40, your risk of disconnection is fairly low. Given a determined effort, it's plausible that the Internet could be shut down over a period of days or weeks, but it would be hard to implement and even harder to maintain that state of blackout.

 

Placements in new IITs When economist Sendhil Mullainathan and his fellow researchers wanted to study the impact of reservations on “lower caste” groups, one of the things they looked at was engineering entrance exam scores. They tracked students who were just above and below the cut off marks, their caste, their economic background, their attitudes etc. The paper itself makes a case for affirmative action (you can read it here), but let us spend a few seconds on the idea of looking around the threshold. When you look at students clustered around the cutoff mark, you are essentially looking at a very similar pool of students. One is as good as the other. The line which separates the successful (at least for that moment) and the rest could well have been drawn arbitrarily.

Interestingly, a similar point was used to counter the argument that increasing the number of IITs will dilute the brand: you are just pushing the line a little. Now there are eight more IITs, and they seem to be doing pretty well. ET reports that the new IITs ”are already nipping at the heels of their much-older and more established counterparts.Big-ticket recruiters like Microsoft,Amazon and Google have descended on these campuses and average salaries have shot up by 15-20 %.In comparison,the older IITs Madras, Roorkee, Kharagpur, Bombay, Delhi and Guwahati have recorded a 5-10 % increase in salaries at the final placement offers.” Not enough data to conclusively prove anything, but signs seem to be good.

 

Eric Schmidt's new book
Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google and Jared Cohen, director of Google Ideas are writing a book that will try to answer some of the big questions in the context of a digitally connected world.

Who will be more powerful in the future, the citizen or the state? Will technology make terrorism easier or more difficult to carry out? How much privacy and security will we have to give up to be part of the new digital age? How will war, diplomacy, and revolution change when everyone is connected? What will be the impact of having both a full virtual life online, and a physical one?

It will be published on April 14

Here’s a recent interview with Schmidt. It's pretty wide-ranging that it could serve as an indicator of whether we will like the book or not
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfalakTPsnE[/youtube]

 

Also of interest

  • Google Says Facebook is ‘Injecting a Monetization Agenda’ Into Intimate Moments | Wired
    “When I’m having a conversation with my daughter, if a man with a sandwich board came and ran between us and danced around, that’s a bad experience,” (Google VP Bradley) Horowitz says. “It interrupts my connection to my daughter. And yet that’s the way that many of the social networks are monetizing. They’re basically injecting the monetization agenda into the least appropriate, least useful, most intimate moments when I’m trying to look another human in the eyes and create a connection of the heart…. We don’t have to do that.”

 

  • YC W13 Will Be Smaller | Paul Graham
    We just finished interviews for the winter 2013 YC cycle. We funded a lot fewer startups this time than last. We funded 84 in summer 2012. We don't know yet exactly how many we'll have in winter 2013 because we usually add a handful after interviews and sometimes a few groups fall apart before we can fund them, but it looks like we'll have less than 50... The reason we accepted fewer applications was that in summer 2012 we grew too fast. We had 66 companies in winter 2012, and that was fine, but for some reason more things than usual broke when we jumped from 66 to 84.

 

The thoughts and opinions shared here are of the author.

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