A Fractured Education System

Engineer. Doctor. MBA. CA. The designations and the corresponding degrees don’t make anyone much excited or proud nowadays. Because in more than 80% of the cases, regarding a student’s profession, you would be getting one of these three answers. The rest 20% may turn up with some or other variant of these courses.

According to a recent survey of  Programme for International Student Assessment(PISA) conducted annually to evaluate education systems worldwide by the OECD(Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) Secretariat., India ranks last 2nd  in the world. Beating Kyrgyzstan.

Since last 5 years I have been associated with various facets of Indian Education System. Firstly and more importantly – As A Student, preparing for getting into a job, watching people preparing for Management Exams(many of whom in fact can’t manage themselves) and higher education, a Trainer for Higher Secondary Science Students,  and guiding one of the Primary School Student. I emphasized `As A Student` because that gives the answer to most of the topics discussed in this article. I discuss various loopholes in the system. Maybe everyone is aware of all these facts. But the problem is to find where and how to find the solution for this fracture in the education system.

I respect some of the achievements and progress made by few of the exceptional educational institutes from various backgrounds ranging from IIMs to IITs to NID. But hereby I will be talking about more general cases prevalent in the system. The qualificational details in the article would be more inclined towards engineering backgrounds.

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1. A Weak and Stereotype Primary Schooling :

Schooling is ought to be the base of what kind of person a student grows into. But sadly, schooling, like any other education system in India, has become a matter of business. There are comparatively very few government run schools which stand upto the required standard. I appreciate the initiatives taken by the government for improving the education and literacy base, but the implementation is targeted towards imparting basic and primary knowledge. Of course, managing to provide a world class schooling to every student is not feasible for govt too. Tuition based learning and lack of practical implementations have proved to be a major fracture point in the system. I have seen few live cases of how the government run schools in villages are operating and surely they would not take the level anywhere except providing a result certificate. Schooling is still majorly following the pattern of mugging up stories and vomit in the papers as much as you can. Hardly any appreciation is made for the students who want to pursue a out-of-normal career like Music, Gaming, Art, ect.

I have seen some schools coming up with the so-called real schooling but looking at the fee structures of lakhs I would consider them so-called for-above-middle-class-schooling making it accessible to a very few % of them.

2. Higher Secondary Cast System: Science Commerce Arts

The higher secondary studies are looked upon as some caste based system. The Science forming the Brahmin Class, The Commerce – the Kshatriyas and Arts – The Sevaks.  Most of the students, say 98% don’t have any practical knowledge of respective branches. Run for IIT, AIEEE and if both of them don’t work State Boards. Many of the decisions are influenced by family so in this case I don’t blame the students. One of the funniest reasons I am hearing nowadays is to pursue MBA.

I think the neighbors become more concerned of your studies than the students. I regret how a stream called Arts can be so demotivated. Commerce is considered more of a hangout stream.

3. The Race Begins: Mission Graduate Degree

Getting into a good graduate program is Imp. Or say Most Imp(*). Because this is the point which decides your career. A good degree – your life is kind of settled. And a bad degree and you end up being an engineer, who after 4 years of hard work ends up working in a call center at 8,000 p.m. + additional incentives or to join your family business and calling yourself an entrepreneur.

But getting into a degree program is not as such a hard task even. Probably every businessman with some good investment in pocket has some or the other- Engineering MBA Medical- college opened for convenience. Recently I read the novel Revolution 2020 by Bhagat and came to know few more in-facts of this education industry.

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Government also, cannot be completely blamed for this. The reason being – they are allowing set up of these institutes to increase the overall education level of the country. Also managing crores of students and thousands of schools, colleges and institutes is not an easy task. State based education board systems have made the education – as a nation – weak. Decentralized organization of these institutes, untrained teachers, monetary business sense based activities have resulted in a chaos in education system.

So, the point is whom to blame for this? The schools, teachers, tuitions, entrance exam patterns, selection criteria, education businessman, government or the student caught in the middle of these all ??

The fear of `Being Average`

The enemy is not the fear, but the intimidation. Fear spurs you to dig the extraordinary within you and achieve it! An overriding fear that afflicts most of us is the fear of being average.

I came across a article “Are You Intimidated by the fear of being average” in Times Life by Vinita Nangia and would like to share this edited version of the article.

To score in any test or to be called ‘one of the crowd’ is anathema to our very being. Nobody wants to be an “also was…” and most of our struggles are directed towards proving how different we are from ‘others’.

This is something which is very characteristic with any age. A child aspires for  toys better than his/her friends. A teenager aspires for a better bike, mobile, mate, etc. A studious one aims for better result, admissions. Every parent thinks his child to be above the average in each term. A youth would like to have better salary, life or way of living, a `not so Maruti Santro` car….

One blogger says he doesn’t want to “blend into the crowd, not be a person people meet and immediately forget”…. Another puts it more graphically, “Living the average life everyone else does – ****ing the same girl for the rest of your life, having kids, getting married, 9-5 job, sitting at home in front of the TV, getting fat, doing the same **** week in -week out. Are you OK with slipping into that category and settling with it?” And yet how different can one be? As my son asked a couple of days ago, “Mom, why is everybody’s  life  the same?  We are all born, learn to talk/walk, go to school, college, get a job, raise a family, and then die….?”

This fear of being an average drives a person in either of the two directions. The first direction is the path of good, working hard, dedication while the second path leads to the destructive thoughts and wrong Karma.

Most of the time what holds us down is being caught up so badly in our fears that we refuse to step outside our comfort zone and actually get down to the task of living life as it is meant to be lived! The pragmatic and wildly popular American singer-musician-actor Taylor Swift said, “I’m intimidated by the fear of being average.”  The problem is not the fear, because the fear is what helps you push yourself to standing full stature. The problem is the intimidation — being so bogged down by that fear that you do nothing about it!

Survey on Social Networking Platforms

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We are presently working on a survey on Social Networking Platforms usage. Please provide your reviews and feedback on this.

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How to do Multiple Account Sign In Google Accounts within the same browser

Many people today keep multiple email accounts in order to separate and organize their online communications. A person may have one email address for business and one for personal activities, for example. Managing multiple email accounts can be a burden, however: Typically a user has to sign in, read the email in that inbox, sign out, and then repeat the process for each additional account.

However, Google recently introduced a feature to simplify the process for users of its Gmail service. With multiple sign-in enabled, users can select their different accounts from a single menu, eliminating the need to sign in and out of each one individially or to log in with different browsers. Here’s how to enable the feature.

1. Go to the Google multiple sign-in setup page. If you are not already logged in to a Google account in your browser, the site will prompt you to enter credentials for one of your accounts.

2. Select On – Use multiple Google Accounts in the same web browser and check each checkbox to acknowledge that you understand the effects of using the feature and that not all Google products support account switching.

3. Click Save to retain the changes for your account.

Now that you’ve enabled multiple sign-in, you’ll have to add each extra account to Google’s list.

1. Go to Gmail and log in with the same account you used above, and then click your name in the top-right corner of the page to bring up account options. Select Switch account from the menu that appears.

2. Select Sign in to another account. This action will open a new login page.

3. Enter the credentials of the next Google account, and click Sign in. Just repeat these three steps for each account you would like to add.

Once you’ve added your accounts, switching between them in Gmail is easy.

1. Click your name in the top-right corner of the page to bring up account options.

2. Select Switch account from the menu that appears.

3. Select the account you wish to check, and Gmail will automatically switch to that account and display your inbox.

Aakash – World’s Cheapest Tablet

The world’s cheapest tablet computer was launched in India on Wednesday with 500 school students becoming the first few recipients. Telecom and HRD minister Kapil Sibal launched the tablet -Aakash - priced at $35 (Rs 1,750) for students pursuing graduation and said that the government aimed to increase production to bring down the cost of the tablet to less than $10 (Rs 500). The government is sourcing the tablet from UK-basedDatawind at Rs 2,256 – inclusive of all taxes, levies, freight and insurance charges, servicing and documentation.

The first lot of 100,000 tablets will be provided to states at Rs 1,750 per tablet. “Our ultimate aim is that in the coming years this tablet should cost less than $10. Datawind has said that if an order of one million units is placed the cost of the tablet (to the government) would be Rs 1,750 ($35), on which the government will offer a 50% subsidy (while giving it to students),” Sibal said.

He added that the private sector was also interested in providing subsidy to help the government achieve the sub-$10 cost for the tablet.

Aakash is the first government initiative in the crowded tablet market in India, with more than a dozen Indian and multinational tablet makers vying for a share of the three-lakh-units-a-year market. The world’s cheapest tablet comes to India at a time when Apple’s iPad holds more than half the market, followed by Samsung’s Galaxy that has cornered roughly a quarter and the rest of the turf occupied by low-cost manufacturers. The $35-tablet is Wi-Fi enabled with a 7-inch touch screen and is based on Google’s Android 2.2 operating system. It has an internal storage capacity of 2GB which can be increased to 32 GB with an SD card, a battery backup of nearly three hours and two USB ports.

Datawind, which makes the tablet in Hyderabad at 700 units a day, will begin selling the tablet commercially by end of November at Rs 2,999 with a year-long warranty, under the brand name of UbiSlate, the company’s chief executive officer Suneet Singh Tuli said. UbiSlate will come with an inbuilt 2G SIM for web access, with an internet plan at .`99 per month, from an Indian mobile operator, which Datawind is finalising as of now.

World War III – The Web Browser Version

THE WORLD WAR III [The Browser Version]

Year 2011. World War 3. And it’s inevitable now. Well before you confuse yourself with this war thing, let me specify what I am talking about. It’s the Web Browser World War-III, this time more intense, targeting millions of people over the world. I am a victim of it too, always confused between whether to use App Store supported and enriched Chrome or the stable and awesome Firefox. With so much of innovation and development taking place it will be no surprise If we see a news channel dedicated to the browser development and updates. Before I jump into the present scenario lets talk a about the history.

1.    History:

“There are two ages of the Internet – before Mosaic, and after. The combination of Tim         Berners-Lee’s Web protocols, which provided connectivity, and Marc Andreesen’s browser, which provided a great interface, proved explosive. In twenty-four months, the Web has gone from being unknown to absolutely ubiquitous”

ZDNet, October 15, 1995

Mosaic was a multiplatform browser developed at National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).One of the Mosaic developers, Marc Andreessen, founded Mosaic Communications Corporation and created a new web browser named Mosaic Netscape. The company was renamed Netscape Communications Corporation and the browser Netscape Navigator and by

1995 it was free for non-commercial use and the browser dominated the emerging World Wide Web.By mid-1995. Netscape Navigator was the most widely used web browser and Microsoft had licensed Mosaic to create Internet Explorer 1.0,^[3][4]which it had released as part of the Microsoft Windows 95 Plus!. There were few other players in the market viz. InternetWorks,Quarterdeck Browser, InterAp, and WinTapestry.Development was rapid
and new features were routinely added, including Netscape’sJavaScript(Jscript). IE began to approach feature parity with Netscape with version 3.0 (1996), which offered scripting support and the market’s first commercial Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) implementation.

1.1 The first indication of the war:

In October 1997, Internet Explorer 4.0 was released. The release party in San Francisco featured a ten-foot-tall letter “e” logo. Netscape employees showing up to work the following morning found the giant logo on their front lawn, with a sign attached that read “From the IE team … We Love You”. The Netscape employees promptly knocked it over and set a giant figure of their Mozilla dinosaur mascot atop it, holding a sign reading “Netscape 72, Microsoft 18″ representing the market distribution. IE 4 changed the tides of the browser wars. It was integrated into Microsoft Windows, an apparent exploitation of Microsoft’s monopoly on the PC platform. IE had three stron advantages during the war- The huge Microsoft Financial Support, a 90% share of Windows in desktop market. During United States Microsoft antitrust case in 1998, Intel vice president Steven McGeady, witness called by the government, said on stand that a senior executive at Microsoft told him in 1995 of his company’s intention to “cut off Netscape’s air supply”. America Online acquiredNetscapefor USD $4.2 billion.

1.2 The End of the Browser War I:

The first browser war ended with Internet Explorer having no remaining serious competition for its market share. This also brought an end to the rapid innovation in web browsersattaining a peak of about 96% of the web browser usage share.On February 2, 2008 the last update to Netscape Navigator 9 was released, based on Mozilla Firefox 2. However, it never regained its market share. Netscape was discontinued on March 1, 2008.

2.    WORLD WAR II:

After the defeat of Navigator by Internet Explorer, Netscape open-sourced their browser code, and entrusted it to the newly formed non-profit Mozilla Foundation—a primarily community-driven project to create a successor to Netscape. Development continued for several years with little widespread adoption until a stripped-down browser-only version of the full suite was created, which included features, such as tabbed browsing and a separate search bar, that had previously only appeared in Opera. The browser-only version was initially named Phoenix, but because of trademark issues that name was changed, first toFirebird, then to Firefox. This browser became the focus of the Mozilla Foundation’s development efforts and Mozilla Firefox 1.0 was released on November 9, 2004. Since then it has continued to gain an increasing share of the browser market, until a peak in 2010, after which it has remained largely stable.

In 2003, Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1 would be the last standalone version of its browser. Future enhancements would be dependent on Windows Vista, which would include new tools such as the WPF and XAML to enable developers to build extensive Web applications.

In response, in April 2004, the Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software joined efforts to develop new open technology standards which add more capability while remaining backward-compatible with existing technologies.^[12] The result of this collaboration was the WHATWG, a working group devoted to the fast creation of new standard definitions that would be submitted to the W3C for approval.

Opera had been a long-time small player in the browser wars, known for introducing innovative features such as tabbed browsing and mouse gestures, as well as being lightweight but feature-rich. The software, however, was commercial, which hampered its adoption compared to its free rivals until 2005, when the browser became freeware. On June 20, 2006, Opera Software released Opera 9 including an integrated source viewer, a BitTorrent client implementation and widgets.

On October 18, 2006, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 7. It included tabbed browsing, a search bar, aphishing filter, and improved support for Web standards — all features already familiar to Opera and Firefox users. Microsoft distributed Internet Explorer 7 to genuine Windows users (WGA) as a high priority update through Windows Update.

On October 24, 2006, Mozilla released Mozilla Firefox 2.0. It included the ability to reopen recently closed tabs, a session restore feature to resume work where it had been left after a crash, a phishing filter and a spell-checker for text fields. However, on January 28, 2008, Netscape announced that support would be extended to March 1, 2008, and mentioned Flock, alongside Firefox, as an alternative to its users.

2.1 The turning point of the war:

Mozilla released Firefox 3.0 on June 17, 2008, with performance improvements, and other new features followed by Firefox 3.5 on June 30, 2009. During the same period the technology giant Google entered this race. Google released the Chrome browser for Microsoft Windows on December 11, 2008, using the same WebKit rendering engine as Safari and a faster JavaScript engine called V8. An open sourced version for the Windows, Mac OS X and Linux platforms was released under the name Chromium. On March 19, 2009, Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8, which added accelerators, improved privacy protection

2.2 Dethroning of IE:

During December 2009 and January 2010, StatCounter reported that its statistics indicated that Firefox 3.5 was the most popular browser. This is the first time a global statistic has reported that a non-Internet Explorer browser version has exceeded the top Internet Explorer version in usage share since the fall of Netscape Navigator. This feat, which GeekSmack called the “dethron[ing of] Microsoft and its Internet Explorer 7 browser,”

On January 21, 2010, Mozilla released Mozilla Firefox 3.6, which allows support for a new type of theme display, ‘Personas’, which allows users to change Firefox’s appearance with a single click. Version 3.6 also improves JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness and startup times.In October 2010, StatCounter reported that Internet Explorer had for the first time dropped below 50% market share to 49.87% in their figures.

Come year 2011 and Google released Chrome 9. New features introduced include: support for WebGL, Chrome Instant, and the Chrome Web Store.Chrome Web Store proved to be a changing experience for people who spends a good time with their browsers and are dependent on it for various applications. It proved to be an instant success in the browser war as compared to long run store run by Firefox and applications. And then one by one, everyone bounced back at each other, with more adavanced technologies stuffed in each time with each release. Chrome 10, IE 9, Firefox 4.0, Chrome 11, Chrome 12, Firefox 5.0, Chrome 13, Firefox 6.0, Chrome 14 and a lot more. The underground development of their upcoming versions is already on roll with beta and developer version releases.

As per the latest report received few minutes ago while writing this article, Google Chrome has crossed the market share by 26%.Firefox has been worst affected by Chrome’s escalating popularity standing at 30%. Firefox has failed to prompt its users to switch from its older versions to newer versions fast enough. IE is still dominating the market with 45% share. The list is followed by Safari and Opera.

 3.    The emergence of WORLD WAR III:

The World War II is on its extreme. And its critical. And with this, all these major browsers are slowly getting into their mobile and tablet versions for various operating system. However, the scenario is quite different here with Opera leading the market. This is strongly backed up with support from mobile OS viz. Android, iOS, Windows,etc. and projects like Mozilla Seabird. The dominance of these kings have crushed the small players in the market. And with the rise of smartphones and tablet phones, there is a strong sense for the emergence of the great World War-III from now.

Mozilla Open Web Phone `Seabird`

The Mozilla Phone is a design effort by Billy May that explores, as part of the Mozilla Labs’ Concept Series, how a phone might interface more seamlessly with users.

Concept Series: Seabird

Overview

The Mozilla Seabird, part of the Mozilla Labs’ Concept Series, is an experiment in how users might interact with their mobile content as devices and technology advances. Drawing on insights culled from the Mozilla community through the project’s blog, a focus quickly developed around frustrating physical interactions. While mobile CPUs, connectivity and development platforms begin approaching that of desktops, the lagging ability to efficiently input information has grown ever more pronounced.

nteraction

The Seabird, then, introduces a few possibilities into how user interaction might evolve with the advancing motion capture and projector driven innovation in the market. First out, the Seabird imagines how a multiple use dongle might augment the crowded gestural interface with greater precision and direct manipulation of content in 3D space.

Pico Projector

With mobile phone companies such as Samsung, LG and Motorola moving towards display applications for projectors, the technology remains open for expanding user interaction and input at the same time. The Seabird, on just a flat surface, enables netbook-quality interaction by working with the projector’s angular distortion to deliver interface, rather than content. With the benefit of a dock, each projector works independently and delivers laptop levels of efficiency.

 

Design

The form development took its cues from various aerodynamic, avian and decidedly feminine forms. Its erect posture intends a sense of poise while its supine conformity to the hand reconciles that with the user’s desire for digital control. The curvature of the back also serves a functional role in elevating the projector lens elements when lying flat.

 

Seabird is a community-driven exploration and does not mean that Mozilla has plans to produce an OS or hardware at the moment. Find out more about Mozilla Firefox for Mobile here.