Disqus - Latest Comments for aurobindo

Re: Upgrades For New Light Rail Vehicles

arvind — Thu, 07 Mar 2019 10:24:34 -0000

For goodness’ sake please don’t add transverse seating - the trains are way over capacity as is, and people will learn to adjust to longitudinal seating just like they do in every other city subway across the world. SF badly needs quick, reliable and high volume transit, so let’s not sacrifice that for a few people with temporary dislike for change.

Re: Infographic: 50 People Shaping The Future Of Design

arvind — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 11:40:32 -0000

well, the future of infographics is certainly not here at Fast Company.. what was the point of all those arrows and water tower metaphors, again?

(if you can't design a useful and usable infographic, what makes you think you have a handle on the future of design? where design now is, certainly – hence the trend-following graphic – but where design is going? that's harder than picking out good designersa)

Re: Sci-Fi Illustrations That Hark Back To The 1980s Heydey Of Moebius

arvind — Tue, 29 May 2012 12:05:36 -0000

Typo: it's 'heyday', not 'heydey'

Re: Why We Desperately Need a New (and Better) Google

arvind — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 03:02:21 -0000

"and perhaps find any references related to the subject of economics" [from the post].

yes, and we can start the whole folk-classification vs. dewey system debate all over again in the search domain. (because we really need tagclouds for our search results.) perhaps we need to bring back the librarians ;-)

Re: What sociologist Erving Goffman could tell us about social networking and Internet identity

arvind — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 23:30:55 -0000

grant mccracken has done some interesting work on identities and how they're being constructed in the age of the internet. check out his blog at http://www.cultureby.com/ and his book 'transformations'

Re: Beware+The+Reverse+Brain+Drain+To+India+And%26nbsp%3BChina

arvind — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 19:46:14 -0000

oh, and for anyone who doubts innovation can happen anywhere, take a look at

http://www.janchipchase.com...

and

http://dadmzungu.blogspot.c...

these guys do incredible things with very little - what many americans would need a garage full of tools to do (and would take for granted as well).

Re: Beware+The+Reverse+Brain+Drain+To+India+And%26nbsp%3BChina

arvind — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 19:26:14 -0000

good heavens! rarely have i seen so much debate with so little evidence!

surveys on what people SAY they WANT to do are not evidence of what they actually do. it would be nice to get real historical numbers for once, instead of this brain-drain and reverse-brain-drain thing that's been going on for seemingly ever.

this is also an incredibly techno-centric view. engineering might have been the heart and soul of innovation for a while, but no longer - making successful products is less about having the smartest people around and more about having a deep understanding of people and shaping an organization around it. that takes more than science and engineering graduates.

it would be nice to see some reporting that connects policy issues with industry challenges instead of vague claims on how immigration is indispensable for innovation. (how come no one talks about how immigration regulations make it extremely hard for temporary immigrants to engage in risky, entrepreneurial behavior? the path from student to entrepreneur is incredibly complicated and uncertain for most people. much immigration policy is designed as a set of silos and little attention is given to how a person's life might move amongst them.)

and commenters, if the best you can come is correlations between the number of H1Bs and a company's commercial success or the number of indians in important posts: i sympathise fully with your deep sense of confusion and indignance and cluelessness, but please refrain from making a public display of yourself until you've actually learned about the issue (this goes for both sides).

Re: have doodle | meh porn

arvind — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 02:39:28 -0000

this is a common misconception about ethnography: it's about a lot more than observation. you can do observation without doing any ethnography.

here's a great talk that talks about some of these common misconceptions: http://www.vimeo.com/2216855

and you might find this paper enlightening: Forsythe, D. E. (1999). “It's Just a Matter of Common Sense”: Ethnography as Invisible Work. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 8(1), 127-145. doi: 10.1023/A:1008692231284.

Re: Larry Page on Real Time Google: We Have To Do It

arvind — Tue, 19 May 2009 18:45:13 -0000

@falafulu, et al. yes, it's not latent semantics, yes it's not clear what the precision/relevance trade off is, and twitter will never be as awesome as google... But.. maybe the problem is calling this 'search' in the first place. It only bears a family resemblance to what one would do on google, and is more akin to tuning and filtering than to searching a vast sea of possibilities. tweets aren't possibilities: they are ephemeral bits of conversation that i'm straining to listen to when i go to search.twitter.com. when i do a google search, on the other hand, i am trying to identify information from a vast heterogeneous set of media that are most certainly not ephemeral. these two possibilities are similar, but i would use them under completely different circumstances. comparing them from an engineering perspective is beside the point, and largely irrelevant considering that relevancy/precision and 'meaning' are going to be traded off with immediacy and pattern-finding based on the circumstances. it would be great to know...

Re: Who's Getting Hired in Tech? Last Week's Jobwire Graphs

arvind — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 17:22:16 -0000

Interesting how the role breakdown doesn't include design or user research...