chakravyuha

A device is statistically going to either break down within a year of it’s operation or would break down after an “extended” period of time. You are covered by the manufacturer’s warranty for the first year and extended warranties would not cover you over a very long period anyway. If you put these two facts together then it seems that the extended warranties are not worth it. There’s also the problem of actually putting these warranties to use. Customer service agents are reluctant to do this kind of work and it’s quite possible that the actual service contract would be handed off to a third party. When the time comes, you will have to deal with these third parties who you have no relationship with.

[Source]: Planet Money podcast

I have quoted the last point almost verbatim from commentator “Hank Van den Berg” and I find it the most convincing and

[Source]: Points derived in large part from the NYT thread “The Catastrophic Option”

[Update]: Tim Hartford, in the FT blog post titled “A brilliant (and doomed) template for healthcare reform“, proposes (at least) considering a system where we pay for medical services the same way we pay for our cars or our food or a roof over our heads

He believes that the high cost of health care is because the users are disassociated from the actual bill of the services rendered. Since people never bear the actual cost of the services and never see the actual bill they never have to wonder about whether a procedure was worth the price. He then goes on to say “I never had to ask myself whether my doctors and I were treading the path of cost-effectiveness, straying off into wasteful indulgence, or indulging in dangerous penny-pinching. Someone else always picked up the bill.“

To tackle catastrophic events then he suggests that it is perfectly possible to design a system where redistribution, forced saving and “real” insurance – that is, against unexpected and very costly events – address these concerns without whisking away every bill before the patient sees it.

And finally, to refute my first point,

it is true that patients do not today have the information they need to make sensible decisions about buying their own healthcare. But then, why would they, given the current systems? I recall the local press in the US being full of articles along the lines of “the city’s 50 best dermatologists”. Value for money was never mentioned, but ask patients to buy their own treatment and you can be sure that such articles would soon be supplemented by the medical equivalent of “cheap eats” reviews.

just went up by a whopping 18% for 2010. I am fortunate enough to be working for a decent sized company with a decent medical coverage and they will absorb about 13% of that. So I am facing a premium increase of a (still absurd) 5%. There will be some increase in the deductible limits though.

Health care reform has still some way to go but I am glad it at least got out of the finance committee. There’s a long road ahead but I hope that we’ll get something meaningful out of it.

Bought the G1 yesterday. The G1 is a HTC phone and it seems to me that it’s supposed to rival the iPhone. Not really used the iPhone but this phone is a beauty! The only problem is that the battery life sucks majorly and that’s where this comes in. I’ve ordered my piece and am waiting for it. The only downside to this large battery is that it’s going to increase the bulk of the phone. In that case though it would still not be any worse than the Palm Treo that I had before.

My list of the reasons for the financial crisis is as follows:

1. The Global Pool of Money – There was a global savings glut and the money was seeking the best returns to be found.
2. Investment Banks
3. Commercial Banks
4. Glass-Steagall Act (and it’s Repeal)
5. Community Re-Investment Act
6. Greenspan’s Put
7. The Housing Bubble and the Politics of Housing
8. Monetary Policy and Interest rates
9. The (Neo)liberalism ideology
10. Debt(Credit?) Instruments (and associated leveraging)
11. CDS
12. CDO
13. Hedge Funds
14. Compensation
15. Greed
16. Hubris
17. Tail Events
18. Regulation
19. Easy Credit (NINA/NINJA loans)
20. Changing nature from Private Partnership to Public Companies – Playing with other people’s money encourages more risk taking.
21. Fat tail events were not factored in.
22. The great moderation was not – it seems business cycles were never really tamed.

Barry Ritzholtz’s list from Bailout Nation (Chapter 19) goes something like this:

1. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan
2. The Federal Reserve (in its role of setting monetary policy)
3. Senator Phil Gramm
4. Moody’s Investors Service, Standard & Poor’s, and Fitch Ratings (rating agencies)
5. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)
6. Mortgage originators and lending banks
7. Congress
8. The Federal Reserve again (in its role as bank regulator)
9. Borrowers and home buyers
10. The five biggest Wall Street firms (Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch,Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs) and their CEOs
11. President George W. Bush
12. President Bill Clinton
13. President Ronald Reagan
14. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson
15. Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers
16. FOMC Chief Ben Bernanke
17. Mortgage brokers
18. Appraisers (the dishonest ones)
19. Collateralized debt obligation (CDO) managers (who produced the junk)
20. Institutional investors (pensions, insurance firms, banks, etc.) for buying the junk
21. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC); Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS)
22. State regulatory agencies
23. Structured investment vehicles (SIVs)/hedge funds for buying the junk

The great Indian guardians of morality strike again, valiantly protecting our  “sabhyata”. This incident is getting a lot of attention primarily because part of it was caught on camera. What you see is a bone-chilling indictment of the health of our society. I’ll leave aside my revulsion and hatred of such acts, my anger and frustration at the logic presented to justify such incidents and still try to analyze it objectively. It’s hard, but I have realized that hatred and anger simply begets more hatred and anger and never solves the problem and hinders meaningful analysis.

The most alarming aspect of this incident (and there are many, many, alarming aspects to this incident) is how a group of people with absolutely no authority of the state behind them – they are not the police – can take the law into their own hands and expect to get away with it. This is happening all over the country. Most recently we saw it in Mumbai with the MNS frothing at the mouth at the supposed injustice of the large presence of people from North-Indian in the state of Maharashtra, a state that was later relieved of a siege by terrorists by troops that would be most likely be comprised of those very North-Indians (they were stationed in Hindi-speaking Delhi so that’s a reasonable assumption). No people can function, far less thrive and create, in a society without adequate protection for the individual and his property. Without order there is chaos and without law there is no justice and no order. A fair, reasonable system of laws is the bedrock of civilization. A functioning law and order system guarantees people that their rights and property will be protected and their movement
safe. The ideals of democracy need the foundation of law and order to survive too.

Then there is this common straw man argument of the undue influence of the (decadent/morally corrupt/women-molesting/lawless – take your pick) “west”. The west is a very amorphous word and does not tell us exactly what is meant by it or who is it supposed to include. Does it include the Eastern-Europeans?, the Russians?, the Japanese?, the Australians? I ask this because there are a lot of similarities in the cultural mores of these nations that are not all geographically west of us. For the sake of argument let’s assume that west is the countries with dominant race being Caucasian and then restrict ourselves to the United States and Western Europe because that’s what people mean when the say “the west”.  People who blame the west should realize that their arguments are largely influenced by the programming that comes out from the US (which is in “the west”). What they see on television is not the nation and not an adequate representation of the culture either. Far from it. Sitcom and drama, by their very nature to titillate, incite, and amuse, turn up the degrees of erotica, drama, and generally outrageous behavior to exaggerated degrees.. You really have to live in the west to realize what west is. The western civilization is an entirely different animal. There’s a big difference between their system of living and ours. The rules of mating and the rules of engagement in public are vastly different from that in India. For example, take the pub and club culture (and for the record a pub and a club are two entirely different venues). In the United States there is no system of arranged marriages and no strong extended families to recommend eligible brides for eligible grooms and vice versa. The task of finding a mate is almost always up to the individual himself. The clubs, discs and pubs are then a necessary tool in the arsenal of an individual to find a mate. Besides, what’s harmful in an occasional beer at a local pub? In Australia – where I lived for a year – there’s such a strong pub culture that people sometime saunter off for a pint in the middle of the day with a group of friends or colleagues. It’s a regular communal event with people chatting over a glass of beer.

Let’s take the western family structure. There’s no shortage of families in the US where parents are working as hard as they do in India to secure a future for their children. We can take exception to how they treat their elderly and leave them to the mercy of a retirement home, how the culture prices individualism often at the cost of insecurity and loneliness. But then we too do not have a functionally ideal family structure in India, with our incidents of dowry-related deaths, children neglecting and often mistreating their parents in joint-family homes and others. And then.. before the western influences are bashed again and blamed for corrupting us, please also realize that practically every single modern convenience that you enjoy today came from the west. The United States was where Edison invented the light bulb, where Henry Ford developed mass production of cars, where the locomotive was developed, where flight was invented by the Wright brothers and where both the AC and DC transmission system was developed. Trust me, these are the very big and obvious examples. A comprehensive list would be very long one indeed. A culture that fosters such innovation and entrepreneurship is surely doing something right. You cannot pick and choose aspects of a culture, that you barely understand in the first place, to pass a verdict on it. A culture is an organic whole. You either understand it and take it’s good aspects or you simply leave it alone because it’s a system of living for a large part of our planet.

It’s rather easy to identify the real trigger of these incidents here. It’s almost always those devilish politicians who have made an art-form out of exploiting gullible, directionless group of people with no economic prospect (show me a spontaneous mob expression and I will show you Yeti). But they are just the trigger and just that. The real problem is the malaise running through our nation. Let’s us realize what these incidents of moral outrage are really about. It’s about lost youth with no employment prospects and no future. It’s about a society that has no respect for law and order or any other institutions for that matter. It’s about a misguided group of people who really believe that the only way to protect our culture is through expressions of such hollow moral outrage. Apologists of this kind of incident – the kind that do not take part in the actual violence but justify the violent outrage with the usual arguments of western influence and moral corruption – are reactionary people who are genuinely afraid of winds of changes blowing through their region or culture.

The solution here is to do many things at once. India is a democracy and the rule of law is one of the pillars of a functioning democracy. Without law and order there is chaos and what we have in India is really chaos. It’s the law of the jungle and everybody in the jungle feels free to act out as he pleases. We need to give these people something productive to do and incentives for them to be swayed into joining these mobs would disappear. This is a problem of economic mobility. We need a better education system and then we need to educate ourselves to what’s going on in the world. We need to create employment opportunity for these youth and give them better tools to understand the world around us and it’s drivers and manipulators. People who genuinely fear for our culture need to realize that preservation can never ever be through coercion. Culture thrives in freedom and in free expression. Culture will thrive when people are free to breath, free to create, free to express and free to act (albeit within the confines of reasonable laws). There’s a peripheral issue here too. We need to have a reasoned and informed debate on these ideas of what exactly our “sanskriti” really is and what ideals should the people derive from it. But those are intellectual arguments that can be carried out in academia or in personal venues where such issues are in context. There arguments cannot be carried out in the streets. Cultural arguments should not have any bearing on how law is dispensed and on how order is maintained. These mobs are not agents that can preserve your way of living. Violence begets violence. It’s a tear in the very fabric of culture that these mobs are supposedly trying to protect. It’s not how India will prosper, or it’s culture preserved. Culture cannot be rammed down eveybody’s throat. Culture grows and thrives where people freely nurture it, analyze it, criticize it and celebrate it.

PS: There’s this hilarious post by the (always great) greatbong on this issue and this thread at churmuri.com.

…here. Perhaps a little unfairly? I had blogged about a talk by Ben Stein at the Commonwealth Club a while back. I found him to be quite reasonable and the concerns about the economy that he raised and his mention of the importance of friends and family and community had a ring of sincerity and made sense.

The dreary and monotonous Jagjit Singh had this to say about A. R. Rahman and his compositions. It’s really sad that an accomplished singer such as Jagjit Singh made this comment. That’s a sign of someone who’s essentially cemented himself in his own musical concrete. Any contemporary phenomenon requires you to get out of your comfort zone and try to see beyond your own blinkered world-view. Jagjit’s Singh’s rigid immobility has perhaps rendered this option impossible for him. So he has decided to take the easy way out and declare “They don’t know what ghazals are all about and they lack good taste in music. What does AR Rahman know about ghazals? He will never use a ghazal in his films. All they do is pick up tunes from the West“.

Rahman does not “lack good taste”. Excuse me, but the man that created modern Indian contemporary soundtrack masterpieces such as “Yuva“, “Rang De Basanti” and “Swades” does not lack nor not lack taste, he defines taste. Musicians like Rahman and Vishal Dadlani are at the vanguard of new music. They create taste. They are defining new Indian music and establishing a new era. So what if he does not use ghazals in his films. Since when did ghazals become the only cultural touchstones? To his comment about picking about tunes from the west, what on earth is that supposed to even mean? Rahman is one of the most original artists on the landscape. He surely cannot be accused of lifting tunes. So maybe Jagjit Singh is talking about Rahman incorporating a lot of instruments of non-Indian origin in his compositions. Is that somehow supposed to lessen his creations?

Music is not just poetic lyrics. Music is not just classical form. Music is not ghazals. Music is not table or guitar. Music is Music. It encompasses all of these and much much more. Good music is not just poetic or beautiful lyrics, it’s also creative, original, virtuoso instrumentation. Instrumental arrangement that soar, uplift, touch your heart and transport you to soci heaven. Jagjit Singh has been singing in the same tone with the same inflections since forever. To me all his ghazals sound musically inert. He might as well just sit down and recite them without any instrument because it surely is perfunctory that form. There might be creativity, poetry and beauty in the written word of ghazals, but there’s surely nothing creative in his music. Rahman’s creations are not just pure fun, they are genius. If Jagjit Singh were not too set in his way he would recognize how good it really is. In my books, Rahman is even a better singer than Jagit Singh.

About those lyrics too, for which he says – “Today, there’s no poetry phrasing, it’s all Western and the language is tapori — a mix of English and Hindi. What kind of lyrics are Pappu can’t dance saala?“. To that I say – “So?”. What’s exactly wrong with non-poetic? What’s wrong with mixing a little English in Hindi? For that matter what’s poetic? Do we not use English heavily in our day-to-day lives? Even non-rhyming verses without a defined meter or other classical elements of poetry might serve well in the context of a song that’s designed to evoke some emotion. When Anupama, Benny Dayal, Blaze, Tanvi, Darshana, Satish Subramanium & Aslam sing “Pappu can’t dance saala” it registers in your system in a way that can only perhaps register with someone who was not born when dinosaurs like Lata Mangeshkar, Kumar Sanu, Udit Narayan, Anu Malik, the duo Laxmikant-Pyarelal etc. roamed this earth and throttled any and all talent that might dare to peek out of that collective colossal edifice that was the music scene of that era. It’s an upbeat emotional call-to-arms to go to the dance floor, to lose yourself in the beat and the rhythm, lyrical poetry be damned. Incidentally, there’s other merit in that song, but I’ll get to that in a later post. All of this is not to bash any of these performers. I acknowledge their obvious talent. What frustrates is how these people got embedded into the whole nation and literally sucked the life out of contemporary music. The 60’s to late 90’s might have been the golden age of the lyric but it’s was the absolute pits for music as a whole.

Culture is not static and if it is, it should not be. A culture that’s rigid and does not learn to bend and twist and even sprout new branches, will just snap one day under the winds of change and cease to exists. Jagit Singh’s comment actually point to a larger malasie in the Indian society. We are just to dammned calcified with notion of supposed superiority of our culture and our ways. If you dig a little deeper we are actually stagnating as a society and as a nation. We are stifling creativity and entrepreneurship and most importantly, change. But I’ll address this point in another post.

I visited Ahmedabad to attend a couple of conferences. Namely, the National Conference On Information And Communication Technologies (ICT) and the Access India Convention
This time, I decided to travel by train since the air fair was too expensive. There were a lot of us going to Ahmedabad but most people were going to the convention rather than the CSI conference. I teamed up with Manish and Aman for the journey.

My first challenge was booking the ticket. Manish did the actual leg work. I wanted to avail of the discount for persons with disabilities so I had to get a medical certificate. That in itself is matter for a separate blog post. The certificate did not work so I had to pay the full price. That was not too much though.

Day 1

The journey to Ahmedabad was an “experience” thanks to our fellow passenger who is a marketing executive with a large Japanese firm. He was a fat man who had his own assumptions about the world. For instance:
A. IT professionals do no work, have no pressure and are well paid.
B. Everyone likes answering his questions and is his best friend.
C. He is superb at making relationships.
D. A man’s worth is measured by the number of phone calls he recieves on his mobile phone.

Needless to say, he was a frustrated man and had apparantly never been tought to keep quiet. I wonder how he managed in school.

Thanks to our fellow passenger, we went to bed at 20:00 after an excellent dinner. I managed to finish a novel since it was on my mp3 player.

Day 2

We reached on time and our hostess sent a friend’s son to recieve us. He was an example of the typical Indian yuth who is trying to find his feet. In due course, we reached our destination.

The Ritz

Our hostess had more than laid out the welcome mat. No red carpet but the wooden floor was unique and we could not ask for anything more. Towels, soaps etc., were plentyful so was privacy and anything else we wanted. Breakfast that day was of south Indian food. Ouch! However, it was well made so I did not have a problem.

The conference was good though the first half could have been better spent having some more sessions instead of multiple inogeration events. Aman had carried food / snaks so we were able to cope effectively with some of the yon inducing sessions. The evening was action packed consisting of a visit to Gujarat university where we had excellent coco and a “maska bun” and then dinner with a friend. Along the way, Aman tried shopping for clothes in a streat market with Manish and me in toe. That attempt, for no fault of ours failed.

Day 3

The second day of the conference was fascinating with presentations from the National Institute of Design, the Centre For Developing of Advanced Computing (C-DAC), Manish and yours truely. There were several other presenters of course. We left the conference early and eventually landed up at a place that served Saurashtran cuisine. It was not sweet for one though I can’t quite remember anything distinctive about the taste. The setting though was interesting since we were in a open air restaurant with bamboo structures. We had to assent a cross between a staircase and a ladder to get to the top of the structure. We were seated on rugs around a stone table. Ug, anyone remember the second book in the Narnia series?

Day 4

The Access India convention was enogurated with a fanfair of access technology. My favorite session was the one with Tina, the image consultant. The agenda was varied but the majority of the sessions were very useful. I had my own demonstration of J-Say in the afternoon from where, I was promptly kidnapped by my uncle and his charming daughter.

Day 5

We packed at night and we were all ready much before time. Shanti Raghavan of href=”http://www.enable-india.org/”>Enable India was undoubtly the star of the morning.

Day 6

The trip back was uneventful except for a fellow deligate being left behind at Alwar. There were a lot of us in the coach and there was a lot of stimulating conversation.

Conclusion

I would repeat this experience anytime. Manish and Aman are excellent friends and traveling companions. The speakers at the CSI conference were varied so one’s interest did not have much of a chance to flag. The Access India conventtion was one of those rare conferences where one is glad that there is no choice of what session to attend. A few points though;
1. The Access India convention must have been the only conference where deligates had to be asked to keep quiet. If the Indian blind cannot behave in a conference, then the corporate world is indeed far away for them.

2. The local organization could have been better and from what I hear, could have provided better residential facilities.

3. We should have made better recording arrangements.

We set out this morning for immersing my grandmother’s ashes in the Ganges. We had to get to the river which was about a 2 hour drive. Before that though, we had to visit the crematorium to collect the ashes. Mind you, those are not ashes in the technical sense of the term. They are actually bones and, in my grandmother’s case, they were very recognizable. By recognizable, I mean that the remnants of the cremation were recognizable as bones. I do not know enough anatomy to decipher which part of the body they belonged to. The drive was uneventful and we got the car to the riverbank without incident. The only thing worthy of note was the amount of told boots we had to cross. The last one charged us 7 1/2 rupees for a dirt track. To be more precise, the road was not really a dirt track. Idle construction machinery was everywhere. My uncle and my father and uncle, who accompanied me, are seasoned civil engineers and project managers. They spent a happy 10 minutes speculating on what could have happened and, reached the same conclusion; namely, that some kind of dispute had risen and the contractor had walked away.

Once we were out of the car, we were besieged by priests and other hangers on. We had to buy some cans to take holy water in and of course try to haggle for the cost of the boat. This was not successful. The rowboat was quite large and, no ores were being used. The boatman was using a long bamboo pole to propel the boat. The priest who came on board performed a small ceremony where, we had to throw flowers into the Ganges and repeat some words he said. He of course try to find out how influential weaver, our connections and in turn, he listed his own connections. My dad had the most physically demanding task of actually scooping my grandmother’s remains out of the earthenware pitcher they were in and pitching them into the river. He had to do a thorough job and, it is difficult to do given the weight of the remains, the picture and the awkward angle at which one has to lean to over the gunwale of the boat. I cannot tell if there was an emotional component to the whole exercise.

Once we were back at the bank, we will once more besieged by crowds asking for money. Apparently, you need to feed people at the bank so; one had to shell out more cash. Just when we reached the car, the local sweepers asked us for money. We finally got away.

The drive back was smooth and, we felt it took less time than the drive to the river. This particular place, he situated in the sugar belt of India. We passed a number of sugarcane fields and sugar mills with several bullock carts standing outside their gates.

So I guess that’s that… My grandmother’s room is almost empty so, by virtue of echolocation, I am able to feel the emptiness. That however is something I will get used to in time. The healing process may have already begun.

I made my first visit to a crematorium. No funeral dirge, no waling women since, in our community, they are not allowed to come for the cremation. We had elected to go with the electric crematorium.
The crematorium is in a small tree lined complex. There is the traditional wood burning one and the electric one. As I disembarked from the car, I could smell the faint odor of holy offerings. The priests are efficient and the paper work so far, has not taken much time. We had to wait for a bit, but the machine was free so, the ceremonies began. They were not very elaborate. The priest said something then my father had to go around a tree and sprinkle holy water.
I had read in Q and A by Vikram Swarup about the skull needing to be cracked to provide easy passage to the soul. My father did not even hesitate. It was a clean blow, no fuss nothing. We then went inside.
The inside of the crematorium was a large hall with the furnace towards one end. The hall was tangibly hotter than the outside. A series of wall fans relieved the heat but made conversation difficult unless you were standing close to the person you were conversing with. There was a small depression near the furnace for placing offerings and carrying out other prayers. This was done and then I heard the crash of the handles as the body was lifted from the bier. One of the handles was then turned anti-clock wise and the body was lowered into the furnace. When the furnace was opened, and though I was about 4 feet away, I could feel a blast of heat. I do not know what the inside temperature was. Another crash, and then the lid were slammed shut and that was that. We could have collected the ashes after 2 hours but we have chosen to do so in the morning on our way to immerse them in the river.
Note:
Given the inside temperature, I could not understand why it would take 2 hours to convert the body to ashes. It turns out that the conversion takes place in about 15 minutes but then the ashes need to be cooled before removal, hence the time taken.
We all trooped out. The priest brought us to a halt and then announced the time of the prayer meeting which is on Monday afternoon at 16:00 to 17:00.

So, people have begun streaming in. They are all sitting in the lobby talking in hushed tones. The phones have wrung almost every 12 minutes. Some callers are very persistant. How does one handle them nicely? I can smell a lot of incense so I guess things are ready for the next phase. The certificate of death needs to be stamped and photocopied. Someone should make a manual for all this. I wonder which ancient text of ours has all this documented.

My grandmother died this morning around 07:45. It was not sudden and everyone knew that this could happen. What is to be done now? Everyone is calm and mom is busy in arranging the body etc. Is there a point to all this? Perhaps the point is to be busy doing something so that the sharp edge is taken off one’s grief. Yet, I don’t know.
I feel adrift like a bark tossed on a medium lighter than air. Do I work, do I study, and do I read? What do I wear? As it happens I am wearing jeans and a shirt. I always thought one wore black clothes on such occasions.
I have also become the local “telephone operator” which is ok. Note: find out when the prayer meeting is. Some people want to know.
I seem to have gone into a self analysis mode. It is if everything has become tasteless or toned down. I can still laugh but my laughter lasts a few seconds longer. I feel solemn and at rest in a void.

One of my relations is under going Laser lithotripsy as I write this post. The family is in a state of controlled panick even though this procedure is quite safe and is considered minimally invasive. As usual, it is only yours truely who has done some research on the whole thing. I should have done this some time ago since I could have asked the doctors some “interesting” questions on why such a procedure was necessary. My main question would have been why could the stone not be shattered by using shock waves as described on the below links?

Some links with information on Laser lithotripsy follow.

http://www.cornellurology.com/stones/treatments/surgical.shtml

http://www.ehealthmd.com/library/kidneystones/KS_treatment.html

That festival is just around the corner again. Yes, I am talking about Holi. I appreciate the sense of community, the triumph over good and evil etc., but please, one water balloon is one too many and don’t spray water and or color on me without asking!

Yes, I have played holi with gusto many times and wont mind doing it again but it was with a group of people who had consented to play. There is an assumption on holi day on the streets of Delhi that any one walking is desperate to play and in a spirit of fellowship, must be obliged!! Just because it is holi, people will not stop taking their constitutional though they may do so at an unusual hour and mundane things like going to a grocery store (I wonder if any will be open) still have to be done.

I paid a visit to Mobile Asia 2008. All I can say is that it was a very “me too” affair. All the vendors had the same kind of phones with touch screens. Everyone was showing off their cameras and music playing features.

Samsung had an interesting Haptic phone while Nokia was betting big on it’s maps. The Haptic phone was interesting but I suspect it’s true capabilities were not being shown since there were no real applications that could take advantage of the technology. Nokia maps are ok and resemble the maps used by Wayfinder. The Wayfinder maps are quite good but as of now, in India, there is no address level navigation.

Generally very positive on India. Negatives: Corrupt and Bureaucratic government, Illiteracy, Infrastructure.

The formI have created a sample accessible form. I need to check this though.

Exponential average workbookPlease review the attached Excel workbook. Have I calculated the exponential moving averages correctly?

I was recently discussing purchasing adaptive technology with a blind computer user. A standard refrain in such discussions is that the adaptive technology in question is very expensive. I cannot understand the term expensive in this context. Yes, one has to make a significant financial outlay for the technology but, it is an investment which will wield great returns. Of course, the great returns will not be in money terms but perhaps in functionality terms. Having said that yes, people do have genuine constraints in their ability to pay but then, they must do their research and see if there are less expensive options available or, look at funding the technology in some other way rather than simply lamenting that it is expensive.