My Perspective

Ten minutes after you start listening to your favourite music album, you feel that something isn't right. Even though you love this album, you can't listen to it anymore. You shut it off, tired, puzzled, and confused. This always seems to happen when you switch from a classic album to a modern one. What you've just experienced is something called over-compression of the dynamic range. Welcome to the loudness war. The “loudness war” (an assault on music and ears - an open secret of the recording industry for nearly the past two decades), refers to the competition among record companies to make louder and louder albums. But the loudness war could be doing more than just that... like halting technological advances in sound quality for years to come. Find out how..? Flash Version http://spectrum.ieee.org/aug07/5480 Text version http://spectrum.ieee.org/aug07/5429 Find out, how can Replay Gain algorithm help in this cause?

I recently came across this interesting article. And I wish to share it with you all. Here's a story about George Dantzig - the famed mathematician who's contributions to Operations Research and systems engineering have made him immortal. As a college student, George studied very hard and often late into the night. So late, that he overslept one morning, arriving 20 minutes late for Prof. Neyman's class. He quickly copied the two maths problems on the board, assuming they were the homework assignment. It took him several days to work through the two problems, but finally he had a breakthrough and dropped the homework on Neyman's desk the next day. Six weeks later, on a Sunday morning, George was awakened at 6 a.m. by his excited professor. Since George was late for class, he hadn't heard the professor announce that the two unsolvable equations on the board were mathematical mind-teasers that even Einstein hadn't been able to answer. But George Dantzig, working w...

Indus Valley is the largest among all the ancient civilizations that existed around 4500 years ago, spread in region of what is now the modern day Pakistan, Afghanistan, and northern parts of India. Interestingly, Indus Valley Script is the world's oldest script that still remains undeciphered. Recently, I came across this awesome TED talk on "Computing a Rosetta stone for Indus Valley Script". Here is the link:  In this talk by Dr. Rajesh Rao puts forth his argument as to why the symbols represent a language script while disproving the claims of other research groups which say that those symbols do not represent a language script. Also read this excellent article by Dr.V.S. Ramachandran, brain researcher in California on plausible connections of Indus valley civilization with Easter Islands in Pacific ocean, a region unconnected geographically with Indus valley..! Quoting Voltaire, " No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking ". ...

I recently watched the movie 'Stanley ka Dabba' (SKD) and here is my review of the movie. In short, SKD is a finely made film highlighting an important social issue and the movie succeeds in doing just that and it does smartly as well. This aspect is very important in a country like ours where pertinent issues like corruption, policy reforms are high jacked in a jiffy by things like IPL or 'Shiela ki jawani' song.

How to determine the distance to a star cluster using its H-R diagram? Background and Need Having covered the background on Star Clusters , H-R diagram ,  Main sequence and the need to study star clusters in our previous article on estimating the age of a cluster , we will discuss about ZAMS. Zero-Age Main Sequence (ZAMS) is the locus of all newly formed stars main sequence (MS) stars on the H-R diagram of a cluster – forming a boundary to the lower left of the main sequence. Idea

The highlights on the criminal and financial background of MLAs in the newly elected May 2011 assemblies of four states - Assam, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and Puducherry: 35% of MLAs of West Bengal, 29% of Tamil Nadu, 10% of Assam and 30% of MLAs from Puducherry have criminal cases pending against them.   75 MLAs of West Bengal, 36 MLAs of Tamil Nadu, 8 of Assam and 2 of Puducherry have declared serious criminal cases pending against them including charges of murder, kidnapping extortion etc.   37% of MLAs of Assam, 52% of Tamil Nadu, 16% of West Bengal and 63% of MLAs from Puducherry are crorepatis.   For the complete analysis on this across all five states where elections were held please read this  report  (pdf) prepared by  Association of Democratic Reforms . For individual state wise analysis please visit this  page . All this information is prepared by collating all the information submitted by the candidates themselves and nothing more...

Recently I came across a comic blog looking at the lighter side of Tamil Brahmins (aka tambram) culture, their superstitions, daily life etc. etc. It is aptly titled " TAMBRAHM RAGE "..  I wish to share a recent article from that blog here. If you cannot relate to tambrahm jokes, there are other such raging blogs...