Wednesday, October 10, 2018

Quick notes: Drone future, ShareChat...

  • Rather than Rafale, think of drones: How far the jetfighters remain in action is anyone's guess. There are ground-to-air missiles with en route course correction. We can ignore them at our own peril. The drones raid in swarms. Stealth aircraft with swarms of drones are already in the offing. Pilotless aircraft and LASER canons are on the drawing boards.


  • Sorry Facebook: Indian politicians are flocking to an unlikely “no English” social network, ShareChat, a fast-growing, indigenous social network. Unlike most of the popular social networks in India, this Android-based platform supports 14 Indian languages. It, pointedly, does not support English.


  • Bengaluru set to go the Amsterdam way: Bicycle sharing system may take off soon.


  • Socialization of losses: Whopping Rs 1 lakh crore NPAs in power sector; banks staring at 40%-60% haircut.. India’s NPAs have surged to about Rs 8 lakh crore.


  • Python convert: This year’s Nobel Prize in economics was awarded to a Python convert. Instead of using Mathematica, Romer used Python—the most popular language for data science and statistics.


  • Swami Sivananda explains about the importance of spirituality in the life of a woman:



  • The placebo effect: What they weren't told was that they would all get placebos, capsules containing nothing but ground rice. "Just because a placebo contains no active chemicals, does not mean the effects of taking it are not real. The average person thinks that placebo is something that's a lie or some fakery, something where the person has been tricked and it isn't real. But science has told us, particularly over the last two decades, that it is something that is very real, it's something that we can see played out in our physiology and neurochemistry."


  • China Makes A Big Play In Silicon Valley: The Chinese govt has been forming global partnerships with Western think tanks, recruiting key talent at networking events sponsored by the Chinese govt and working with U.S. universities."I'd say they're very systematic, very long term in their approach and very well-funded".. Instead of buying an existing U.S. business, these Chinese tech giants come to the U.S. and build new companies from the ground up, in what's known as "greenfield" investments. They hire away a lot of U.S. employees who might otherwise work for American businesses.


  • Tata Group history is also the history of Indian industry: “Even though he was at the helm of the Tata Group for 53 years, J.R.D never owned a personal plane. The house he stayed in was not his own; it was rented. He operated through empowering people.”


  • Churchill's "magnanimity": "As a matter of fact the grain he took away from Bengal was NOT NEEDED by the allied forces (and largely rotted) but he took it anyway to punish Bengal for having supported Gandhi. Millions died. It was a bumper crop year"



No comments: