India, along with other countries, has been a attracting attention in the west recently with respect to both outsourcing as well as long term global economic trends, and the issue seems to have attained a critical mass, with both the Beeb and McKinsey Quarterly doing specials simultaneously.

The Auntie is running special programming for "India Week" on BBC World TV channel as well as on the BBC News web pages and, as is wont, has an all round approach; with coverage from cultural and social angles, along with economic/governmental approaches. Of course, no serious journalistic thesis on India would be complete without pictures of overloaded mass transport, so there's some of that too! (And the logo manages to invoke agriculture, bindi, and the rising sun all at once :|)

The McKinsey Quarterly special edition: Fulfilling India's promise which has been in the hopper for a almost a couple of months, with articles coming online as they're ready, now seems to be complete. Most of the articles deal with specific facets of India's economic future: for instance energy needs, or potential as a manufacturing hub (both pay-to-read) or problems with the financial infrastructure (register-to-read); but there are a few qualitative articles with overarching themes. The ones I would specifically recommend for general consumption are the introduction to the special issue by Rajat Gupta, and Why Believe in India, as well as an engaging interview with the PM Dr. Manmohan Singh.

All in all, it looks like the pot has come to a boil. Hopefully the cooking will be worth the wait.

- Chinmay

Categories - ~India~

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Stan Williams from HP Labs' QSR group was here yesterday, to deliver the Keynote speech at the 6th Nano Day.

He presented some really interesting research that they've been doing at HP, including a way of doing logic where the information is not represented by voltage, but by resistance. (The were initially trying for crossbar memory, but recently realized that two adjacent contacts could function as a latch)

If you know your Boolean algebra, you'd know what he meant by "creating a NAND function using three Implication gates" (or something to that effect.) And if you know your chip design, you probably also understand that if you have a NAND gate, you can build a universal computer. (I don't, understand, that is... I'll have to take it on face value for now.) The remarkable thing is, this 'computer' does not need any semiconductors - it's built entirely out of conductors with resistive junctions (think crossbar memory architecture)

You can read the related publication "The crossbar latch: Logic value storage, restoration, and inversion in crossbar circuits" here (if you have access to Journal of Applied Physics...). Also see the Applied Physics A March 2005 special "Nanoelectronics" issue, where the QSR group has 20 papers.

HP stock is currently near 52 week highs and the P/E is 26, but if they're going to build the next generation of computers, that might work out to be cheap.

Finally, Feynman Lectures on Computation

- Chinmay

Categories - ~Science~

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