Blissful Life

Category: Knowledge

  • Why Wikipedia Is Evil

    Don’t get me wrong. I’m a fan of many things about Wikipedia. I have a small number of edits on Wikipedia too. But, I think democratizing knowledge creation is more important than Wikipedia. And that’s why the title.
    I have written with examples about how Wikipedia’s claims about it being “the sum of all human knowledge” is highly misplaced in my old article titled: “Don’t put all your eggs in one Wikipedia“. In that article I also talk about how Wikipedia could become the foundation for building a federated knowledge system. In this post I talk about why it is necessary to decentralize Wikipedia.
    Monopolies are bad
    It is not that there cannot be socially conscious and good natured monopolies. It is that the existence of monopolies in a society is bad. It stifles innovation by restricting it to only the monopoly. It gives great power to the people who control the monopoly. Arbitrary rules can be created by these people and everyone else is forced to follow suit.
    Healthy competition is the cornerstone of capitalism. Monopolies make competition tough. Worse, monopolies make competitors look bad even when they’re better. Monopolies make it look like the reason for the failure of competitors is incompetence whereas a large part of the reason could be the existence of a monopoly.
    Amazon, Uber, China, there are many examples.
    Monopolies don’t announce themselves
    That monopolies are bad is clear to many people. But recognizing monopolies is sometimes hard. A monopoly doesn’t always start out as a monopoly. And there usually isn’t an announcement when someone becomes a monopoly. In fact, monopolies always deny they have monopoly.
    Here is where Wikipedia becomes interesting.
    Wikipedia announces itself as wanting to compile the sum of all human knowledge (and sometimes even claims to be the sum of all human knowledge). I have ranted enough about this in the older post. But the fact that not enough people question this statement by Wikipedia founders and others should make us think: Have we accepted Wikipedia as the sum of all human knowledge?
    If we have, then we have laid the foundation for Wikipedia to become a monopoly. A monopoly over knowledge.
    We may be too late to act too.
    Wikipedia has prominent ranking on search results for many many terms. Often, people read only the Wikipedia result. These people linking back to Wikipedia creates a reinforcing feedback loop. (Of course, the role of Google’s monopoly over search and discovery of knowledge is also to be questioned).
    Because there is so much of knowledge already present in Wikipedia, many people think that what is not present on Wikipedia is not notable enough or is not important enough to know. Paid editing has existed on Wikipedia from a long time and the reason is that it is becoming increasingly impossible to build a brand without building it through Wikipedia also. And why is that so? Because a large number of people use Wikipedia to measure the relative relevance of knowledge. Wikipedia is becoming the trusted bank of knowledge. Wikipedia is gaining monopoly over knowledge.
    Not all of this is Wikipedia’s fault. There are many projects which try to become collaborative editing spots for various niche topics. Radiopaedia, for example tries to become a reference website for radiology. Yet, for many projects Wikipedia is a large competitor because it is the so-called “sum of all human knowledge”. Editors would rather write on Wikipedia than a smaller collaborative project.
    Because we give Wikipedia too much credit. We consider it the reference. We adore it. We are too scared to fork off. We make it a monopoly. Stop doing that.

  • The Connection Between Curiosity and Knowledge

    Last week, 7½ years after Aaron Swartz death, I was thinking about what made Aaron smart. There is this quote:

    “Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. What people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.”

    Curiosity. It keeps popping up here and there.
    I was read Anand Philip‘s blog today. The “about” page is just three lines:

    Generalist.

    Superpower: Curiosity.

    Probably not a cat

    Can curiosity be a superpower?

    One of the answers was about The Oxford Electric Bell:
    There wasn’t much detail about the bell in the answer. Intuitively I was thinking it could be something like a clock that would require winding every now and then. But I wasn’t sure. So I went to the wikipedia page on it.
    That’s where I learned that it is an actual bell that rings about twice a second and holds “the Guinness World Record as “the world’s most durable battery [delivering] ceaseless tintinnabulation””
    Now there are many things to learn on this page. We might want to see the bell ringing on Youtube. We might want to read about perpetual motion. We might even want to read about the word tintinnabulation.
    Which reminded me of an old friend Akashnil Dutta who according to LinkedIn is now a Member of Technical Staff at OpenAI. It was about 9 years ago in a camp that I met Akashnil where he told me about magnetotactic bacteria. I asked him how he had come across this rather uncommon piece of information.
    He said he would use the “Random Article” feature of wikipedia to find new stuff.
    Curiosity is a super power.
    Read. Notice. Be curious. Question. Read more. Repeat.

  • My Obsession with Free Knowledge

    I have a peculiar attachment with free knowledge – the concept that knowledge should be free of conditions and unencumbered by geographical, economic, cultural, and any other avoidable barriers. This often puts me in a position where I strangely reject certain well meant advices simultaneously appearing stupid and arrogant to others.

    For example, a good friend and fellow citizen once suggested to me that I join Landmark Forum, a 3 day course that helps people understand their hidden biases and become more productive people. I listened to their forum leader speaking about how the course works and the psychology behind it and I was sure it would be a fantastic idea. But, when it came to registering for the course and participate, something prevented me from doing it.

    The other day I asked a pharmacologist friend if she knew any prophylactic treatment for syphilis. She went to UpToDate (or I’m not sure if it was some other similar service) and started looking up the information. I was curious what she was using and whether I could have it in my phone too. She said it would need a subscription, but she was willing to share her username and password with me. I said that I didn’t want access to it.

    Yesterday a close friend suggested Dr Thameem Saif’s lecture series on basic concepts in medicine for me. She said that it was really good and helps to grasp basic concepts really fast, saving a lot of time. I agreed with her on all that and said I wouldn’t attend the lecture series.

    Additionally, I hate the concepts of entrance coaching, tuition, etc.

    The pattern I see emerging is that I have constant disregard for knowledge that is held behind restrictions, especially if tied with a business. I don’t consider making a business out of knowledge evil. But I hold a pet peeve against using that kind of knowledge for my personal benefit.

    To understand this attitude, you need to look at the other things that I value and principles that I care for.

    Free software

    Free as in free speech, not free coffee. Here is an interesting paragraph from gnu.org about free software:

    The idea of the Free Software Movement is that computer users deserve the freedom to form a
    community    . You should have the freedom to help yourself, by
    changing the source code to do whatever you need to do. And the
    freedom to help your neighbor, by redistributing copies of programs to
    other people. Also the freedom to help build your community, by
    publishing improved versions so that other people can use them.

    I have been an ardent user and advocate of free software for the past 8 or so years. The idea that there is collective ownership of software and people being able to make and share improvements on the software with each other thus creating a better product for everyone is addictive. So much that once you subscribe to this philosophy you feel grudge and guilt if you were to use or be forced to use non-free software for any task.

    I can still use Microsoft Word on my parents’ computer running Microsoft Windows to type a letter. But it simply won’t feel right.

    Open Web

    The Open Web is that part of the world wide web which is open for anyone to use, create, and innovate in irrespective of their location, race, gender, economic status, etc. according to me.

    Internet has enabled human dreams far quicker than any other invention. Internet is a great equalizing force. Internet has elevated human life to a higher level. And Open Web is the most important pillar of this success.

    With the Open Web, it is far more easy and quick for people anywhere on earth to share and receive knowledge. Collaboration is cakewalk. Building upon each other’s ideas becomes rule rather than exception. Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel worked on two critical pieces of the theory of evolution at around the same time. But they never knew about each other’s work. Won’t ever happen in the internet age.

    When I see internet services that are “app-only” or requires sign in for viewing, I wince. They are justified in trying to retain users. But it simply won’t feel right for me to use such a service.

    Open Access

    With internet, the cost of publishing came to almost zero. And so one would think that science literature would become cheaper and cheaper to access. But the opposite is the truth. Scholars expend their lives trying to expand the horizons of science and publishing industry locks down their contributions to select few who are willing to pay exorbitant amounts of money to access this.

    People who fight these are killed. But their spirit cannot be killed. Open Access movement is gaining large amount of followers. When enough academicians hold fast to the promise that they won’t publish in money-thirsty journals, there will be a tilt in the way scientific literature is published.

    Science needs to be set free. And open access to scientific articles is crucial here.

    I’ve not published anything yet. But when I do, it will be open access. And I keep asking the people I have any influence over, to keep their contributions to the knowledge base that humans have built to be open access.

    Free Knowledge

    It is in this backdrop that free knowledge enters.

    Organizations like Wikimedia, Creative Commons, and even YouTube have done a lot to advance free knowledge. “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.”

    If you have been reading carefully till now, you know that free culture is my culture. And free knowledge is an inalienable part of free culture.

    From as early as 11th standard, I have been using the internet and all the wonderful resources in it to learn. I fell in love with MIT’s OpenCourseWare. When NCERT textbooks weren’t enough I would run to OERs like CK-12.

    But when I joined MBBS I faced the greatest challenge ever. To date I have not been able to find any good collaborative (or not) open textbook online for medicine or any subject that medical education includes. There have been very good attempts like Ophtho book, Path Bites, Radiopaedia.org, etc. But the information is usually so scattered that it is very difficult to get a comprehensive understanding of the subjects.

    In this scenario, I was forced to resort to traditional textbooks. I made it a point not to purchase expensive textbooks. I’ve scraped all the corners of the internet to find out useful PDF files.

    And at the same time I made a pledge to myself that I will leave the condition a bit better by organizing the information that I find and making it possible for a future student to click on links and get access to various information as required. That is why learnlearn.in was born.

    Now that I have finished MBBS I no longer am under duress to stick to textbooks to avoid prolonged stay at a not-so-nice place. But, in the spirit of pirate philosophy, I continue to access resources that are required even when they’re not free knowledge. But I have set a personal restriction that I will not be using resources that aren’t obtainable from the internet.

    By doing this I am expecting to create a path which can be followed by others. I want success, but I want only reproducible success. I don’t want to be successful because I had access to a particular resource by virtue of my geographical, economic, cultural, or any other privileged position.

    So what about things I learn at VMH? Well, my plan here is to put everything that I learn here online. Also, a point to note is that at VMH there’s no package of knowledge that is sold. It’s all experiential learning that occurs here. And people are welcome to work and learn from here.

    Can’t you do the same with Forum, UpToDate, and Dr Thameem? Well, not impossible. But, like I said earlier about using Windows as a free software advocate, it just doesn’t feel right.

    But more importantly, by striving to learn exclusively from free knowledge resources, I create a demand for free knowledge thereby encouraging creators to produce more content in free domain and also allowing people who come after me to have a road that’s been taken before them.

    Let’s build a society where knowledge is free.

  • Don’t put all your eggs in one Wikipedia

    If you have ever tried creating a wikipedia article on a not so popular subject you know how it gets flagged for speedy deletion even before you make the second edit on the page.

    For example, I recently tried creating a page for Swathanthra Malayalam Computing which anyone active in the free software sphere of Kerala would be knowing about. But, it was soon deleted. I have a fairly good understanding of how the WP:NOTE policy works and I was fairly convinced with my knowledge of reliable sources that SMC is notable enough to warrant an inclusion in Wikipedia. So, I started trying to convince the administrator who deleted the page (a non-Malayali, non-Indian) to restore the article. After at least 4 hours spent in writing essays to convince him, the article was partially restored to my User space. I was then asked to edit it, get it reviewed and then move it to the encyclopedia.

    This ruthless deletion of content can be understood from one point of view – that of maintaining a high quality encyclopedia which gives people immediate access to a brief summary of a certain topic.

    But that’s where Wikipedia (or rather Jimmy Wales) becomes slightly hypocritical and arrogant. It’s claimed (by who? by Jimmy Wales and many others) that Wikipedia is trying to give people free access to the sum of all human knowledge.

    Is this realistic or true? Can Wikipedia be the sum of all human knowledge? Assuming Wikipedia gets enough donations to run millions of servers. Can it include the sum of *all* human knowledge? Or, more importantly will it?

    Wikipedia quite clearly allows only encyclopedic knowledge to be included in itself. And there are quite a few guidelines on what content belongs to Wikipedia and what doesn’t. This very fact shows that “encyclopedic” is only a subset of all human
    knowledge and has two corollaries:

    1. wikipedia is not the sum of all human knowledge
    2. the editors will constantly be under pressure to categorize any
      knowledge as encyclopedic and non-encyclopedic and omit some of the
      information

    This is a handicap wikipedia has put on itself to
    make itself useful for someone who comes in for a superficial knowledge
    of a topic. Thus wikipedia easily becomes a ready reference to get an
    overview of things. But it becomes impossible to go deeper on anything.

    And this compulsion to trim articles by removing some facts selectively paves way
    for problems like the hegemony of asshole consensus.

    I believe the problem is that we try to put all our eggs in Wikipedia because we’re mistakenly led to believe that only the content that exists in Wikipedia is the content that is worthy of knowing. (Because you see, Wikipedia is the sum of all human knowledge). This is both false and stupid.

    Who decides notability on Wikipedia? The editors, based on notability guidelines. And who decides that? People like Jimmy Wales and editors who have significant majority or influence over the policy formation process of Wikipedia?

    Currently notability is heavily relying on reliable sources. Who decides reliability? In a world where censorship and political correctness is not unknown, is there a way to be sure that reliable sources are telling you the whole truth and nothing but the truth?

    Does these policies and guidelines take into account the perspectives of people who are under-represented on Wikipedia?

    How different is Wikipedia from a multi-author blog? Does having a million editors automatically make Wikipedia infinitely better than a blog if what the editors can and cannot do is decided by a smaller set of people?

    But, are you saying all codifiable knowledge should go on Wikipedia? Shouldn’t there be some kind of curation or peer review of what is right and what’s wrong?

    What I am saying is that Wikipedia should stop claiming that it is the summum bonum of human knowledge. (This should also help them be less arrogant when trying to push Wikipedia as the only website that people need access to)

    It is not, and it can never be.

    The closest it can come to that is to become a great foundation for building a federated system in which people can easily get started codifying all the knowledge that they happen to have. In fact, by creating mediawiki software they’ve done a great deal towards that.

    The next step they should embark on is federation. Federation instantly solves all the problems that I mentioned above. Because if one wikipedia doesn’t like your content, there would be another wikipedia to accept it. Instead of spending all your time and effort in convincing a random white male admin that your article is worthy or notable, you can spend it on writing down all that you know about your subject on a wiki where it is welcome.

    But remember that this is already how the Internet is. The Internet is decentralized and
    federated. “Knowledge” on the Internet is uploaded by whoever is interested.
    People have to spend some energy in figuring out what is correct and what’s
    wrong. Instead of censoring anyone, the Internet allows everyone to speak. Peer review and content curation is implemented not by removing content, but by adding more content. If there’s something wrong on the Internet, there’ll be another article on the Internet explaining why it is wrong.

    Wikipedia can help a lot if it tries to facilitate this process by encouraging federation. But instead if it tries to be a centralized authority, it is hampering access to knowledge.

    In other words we must give Wikipedia only the importance that it deserves – just another multi-author website on the Internet. Wikipedia is not the sum of all human knowledge; the Internet could be.

  • Bucephalus and Kanthaka – two Horses from History

    Heard of Bucephalus or Kanthaka. From the title you’d have understood that they are two horses. But the fact is that they are not just horses. They are the horses of two great men.

    Bucephalus was Alexander the Great‘s horse and the most famous actual horse of antiquity (a long period of cultural history centered on the Mediterranean Sea, comprising the interlocking civilizations of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome).

    Now, Kanthaka was the favourite horse of Prince Siddhartha, (who came to be known as Gautama Buddha)

    Two creatures etched in history by the grace of their masters.

  • One Great Educational, Astronomical Website – Chandra Harvard

    Since its launch on July 23, 1999, the Chandra X-ray Observatory has been NASA’s flagship mission for X-ray astronomy, taking its place in the fleet of “Great Observatories.

    This is what they have to say about the observatory. But, actually though this website is designed to be a connection between people and the Chandra observatory, it happened to include some great educational resources.

    If you are in the search of a great place to start your journey in inter-galactic science, then the chandra.harvard.edu, is your answer.

    And, if you are interested only in those educational resources, here is where you must go : Education

  • ‘Saraswati Vijayam’ by Potheri Kunjambu

    ‘Saraswativijayam’ (1892) is a malayalam novel by Pother Kunhambu (1857 – 1919)

    Saraswativijayam begins with the attempted killing of a Pulayan for daring to sing in the vicinity of a proud Nambudiri landlord. Although believed to be dead, the Pulayan survives, and the rest of the novel follows the two protagonists – the master and the slave – as each of them seeks out his particular salvation. The Brahmin goes to Kashi and cleanses himself of pride and ignorance, the Pulayan, through the space opened up by colonial education and Christianity, becomes a judge. At the end of the novel, the Pulayan presides over the trial of the Nambudiri and also marries his granddaughter Saraswati. The novel has the epigraph: Education is the greatest of all wealth.

    Source: Hindu

  • Online web-building tutorial – W3schools

    At W3Schools you will find all the Web-building tutorials you need, from basic HTML and XHTML to advanced XML, SQL, Database, Multimedia and WAP.

    So you are one more step closer to building your own website

  • Chandrayaan-I Know Everything about it

    The best one who can tell you about Chandrayaan is ISRO. So, I’m not extending this paragraph to the end of this page. Here’s the link ISRO Brochure

  • Payloads of Chandrayaan-I

    There are 11 payloads of which 5 are Indian, 3 of ESA, 2 of United States and 1 is from Bulgaria.

    The 5 Indian ones are

    1. Terrain Mapping Camera (TMC): For complete mapping of moon topography.
    2. Hyperspectral Imager (HySI): a CCD camera designed to obtain the spectroscopic data for mapping of minerals on the surface of the moon as well as for understanding the mineralogical composition of the moon’s interior
    3. Lunar Laser Ranging Instrument (LLRI): To provide necessary data for determining the accurate altitude of Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft above the lunar surface. To determine the global topographical field of the Moon as well as to generate an improved model for the lunar gravity field.
    4. High Energy X-ray Spectrometer (HEX): 1st planetary experiment to carry out spectral studies at ‘hard’ X-ray energies using good energy resolution detectors. Designed to help explore the possibility of identifying polar regions covered by thick water-ice deposits as well as to identify regions of high Uranium and Thorium concentrations.
    5. Moon Impact Probe (MIP):To demonstrate the technologies required for landing a probe at the desired location on the moon.

    More at ISRO

    Other payloads

    1. Chandrayaan-1 Imaging X-ray Spectrometer (C1XS): This instrument intends to carry out high quality mapping of the moon using X-ray fluorescence technique for measuring elemental abundance of Magnesium, Aluminium, Silicon, Iron and Titanium distributed over the surface of the moon.
    2. Smart Near Infrared Spectrometer (SIR-2): This instrument aims to study the lunar surface to explore the mineral resources, the formation of its surface features, the way different layers of the moon’s crust lie over one another and the way materials are altered in space.
    3. Sub keV Atom Reflecting Analyser (SARA): The aim of this instrument is to study the surface composition of the moon, the way in which moon’s surface reacts with solar wind, the way in which surface materials on the surface of the moon change and the magnetic anomalies associated with the surface of the moon.
    4. The Bulgarian 1
      Radiation Dose Monitor (RADOM):       This instrument aims to qualitatively and quantitatively characterise the radiation environment in space around the moon’s vicinity. It will help study the radiation dose map of space near the moon at various latitudes and altitudes.
    5. Nasa’s 2
      Mini Syntheic Aperture Radar (MiniSAR):       This is one of the two scientific instruments of the United States flown in Chandrayaan-1 mission
    6. Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3): This is an imaging spectrometer which is intended to assess and map lunar mineral resources at high spatial and spectral resolution to support planning for future targeted missions.

    Read more at ISRO