Accidental Blogger

Apple, Samsung, and Jeff Han (prasad)

One of the patents Apple successfully defended against Samsung recently is one on the pinch gesture to zoom using a multitouch interface. It has been pointed out that, given multitouch, this gesture is about the most obvious imaginable to accomplish a zoom, and you shouldn't be able to patent such obvious things. Pointed out too that Apple didn't patent a particular implementation, but the very idea of a pinch zoom, which is like patenting the notion of a steering wheel. And that if implementation-free ideas are to be granted patents, movies like Minority Report exhibited the idea well before Apple.

But here's something else:

An NYU professor working on human computer interfaces demoed every touch technology Apple would market (plus a lot more) at an extremely prominent technology conference. That talk is from February 2006, and was widely circulated at the time because of how exciting and cool the technology and its applications were. Apple filed its patent application in December 2006. Nor is it like Han was the only person at the time working on such things.

Apparently Samsung actually brought up the Jeff Han video in court, but for some reason this wasn't deemed a decisive consideration. Much is said about how the patent system is broken in terms of trivial things being patented, like obvious gestures. And that's all correct, or that's how it seems to me at any rate. Here though, it sounds like the bigger problem is prior art and invalidation of patents for that reason. How on earth did Apple win this patent to begin with, and why didn't the court quash that patent when contested?

Re-blogging [Cat (or Global Forces) Got Your Tongue?]

New posting has been sporadic at best for some time. Rather than leave the pages static for long periods, I plan to bring to the front older non-time sensitive articles that are either interesting in themselves, generated a lively discussion or both.

Here is one about dying languages. The comment section (do read the thread) in the original post is closed. If you wish to express an opinion on the subject, please do so here.

Rape as contraception!

The media have been all atwitter with the news of congressman Todd Akin's (R-MO) radio interview where he claimed that a woman cannot get pregnant as a result of a "legitimate rape."

"If abortion could be considered in case of, say, a tubal pregnancy [which threatens the mother’s life], what about in the case of rape?" asked KTVI host Charles Jaco, in a clip that was disseminated by Talking Points Memo. "Should it be legal or not?"

"It seems to me, from what I understand from doctors, that's really rare,” Akin said, referring to conception following a rape. "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let's assume that maybe that didn't work or something, I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be of the rapist, and not attacking the child."

I haven't heard the expression before.  Most of us know what constitutes rape and so does the law and it is never legitimate. So what was Akin thinking? I have a suspicion that for many men, rape occurs only if the victim is first beaten to a bloody pulp before she submits to non-consensual sex. If she is not  brutalized during the process, rape could not have taken place. Why, the woman may have actually enjoyed the encounter or just changed her mind about consent after the fact. 

Congressman Akin is among many others on the right who oppose abortion under most circumstances, including rape and incest. Some of them suspect that women seeking to end unwanted pregnancies will cry rape if that constitutes legal grounds for abortion. So in order to leave rape out of the abortion debate it would be convenient if it can be proved "scientifically" that a woman cannot get pregnant as a result of rape. (Incidentally, Akin is a member of the House science commitee. That should give us pause)

The Republican Party (even its Tea Party wing) is sufficiently embarrassed by Akin's "gaffe" to demand that he pull out of his senate race against Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO).  I wonder why the GOP is acting with such alacrity. After all, it is not the first time that a right wing politician has opposed the exemption for rape when legislating abortion laws or made flippant and ignorant remarks about it. It is widely believed that the Republicans fear that Akin's opinions if aired in the media for long will also shed light on Romney's running mate Paul Ryan's views on rape and abortion. Ryan has worked closely with Akin in the House to co-sponsor an anti-abortion bill. Only in that bill, the expression was "forced rape." Well, I guess we can now legitimatley ask Ryan what the definition of "voluntary rape" is.

Scribes in a digital age

The "Musalman," an Urdu newspaper has been published daily for 85 years in the southern Indian city of Chennai. It is written by hand.  (h/t: Azra Raza of 3 Quarks Daily)

"Tasher Desh" (The Land of Cards)

This is a short post to share a surprising discovery today while reading a Bengali essay by a Belgian Catholic priest (he may be French - I am not wholly certain but definitely a French speaker who reads and writes fluent Bengali; things are getting mixed up already).

Haven't played a game of cards for a long time except the solitary ones on the computer. It used to be a favorite pastime during the long hot summer vacations. We used the Bengali, Hindi/Urdu and English names for the suits of cards depending on the game and the company. At home, where my mother was very often a participant, we almost always used Benglai. I had always wondered about the Bengali card names because unlike their counterparts in English and Hindi / Urdu, they do not mean anything. Now I know why. They are distortions of foreign words.  Three of the four names of the suits of playing cards in Bengali derive from Dutch! Ruhiton, Haroton and Ishkapon (diamonds, hearts and spades respectively) in Bengali correspond to Ruiten, Harten and Schoppen in Dutch. The exception is the suit of clubs which is Chiraton in Bengali and Klaveren in Dutch for clover.  Chiraton is related to the Hindi / Urdu name, Chiri meaning bird. It seems that Bengalis learnt to play the western (French origin) 52 card game from sailors of the Dutch East India Company.  

Prior to that card games with 96 card decks were popular in India. The cards were called Ganjifa (or Ganjipha) and they had been imported to India by the Persians employed by the Mughal courts. Ganjifa cards had some similarity with the French system in assigning value to each card but were otherwise distinct. Gradually they assumed regional flavor in different parts of India, often supplanting Persian iconography with Hindu religious mythology, such as the ten Avatars of the god Vishnu and other folklore. The production of the handmade Ganjifa cards became an art form. From the distinct Persian form of the Mughal court in the north, different versions of the card game became popular in Maharashtra and Gujarat in western India and Bengal and Orissa in the east, giving rise in the process to new artistic renditions and games with local rules.

(Mughal Ganjifa deck) (Ganjifa cards depicting Hindu gods)

(The title of my post refers to a popular Bengali dance drama written and composed by Rabindranath Tagore. Perhaps Sujatha can provide some good links to the music. Thanks to my sister Mandira for educating me on the history of Ganjifa.) 

Shootings and searches (prasad)

I had a vague sense that the Aurora movie theater shooting last month became a much larger story than the Wisconsin gurudwara shooting last Sunday. Google trends thinks the same thing, going by search volumes for Aurora and Sikh over the past month. (I pasted the Google Trends volumes first for the US, then for India, then for the world)

1. Within the US, the peak interest in the Batman shooting was several times higher than that for the Wisconsin gurudwara shooting, and the interest was a lot slower to die away.
1.1 Aurora beat Sikh in every state, Wisconsin being the only one where Sikh came close.
1.2 There seems to be an English/Spanish difference - searches in Spanish were basically entirely uninterested in the Gurudwara case (changing the query to 'sij' changes nothing, except that no one on the English site was searching for it!).

2. In India, Sikh beat Aurora, though not by a very large amount, once you subtract out the high base rate of Sikh which has nothing to do with the Wisconsin attack.
2.1 Within India the pattern is as expected - Punjab, Haryana and Delhi were wildly less interested in Aurora (though I wasn't able to see the graphs for Indian states separately - maybe that difference comes in part from the base rate, and not from the shooting peak.)
2.2 The further south you go the more the relative interest in Aurora increases over Sikh and both Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu were actually rather more interested in Aurora than in Sikh.

3. The worldwide trend tracked the US one, with Aurora beating Sikh in every country except India. Google doesn't think it has enough search volume to give results for Pakistan. The more Anglophone countries showed some degree of interest in Sikh. Many of the country level graphs just look like noise, so I suspect neither of these was a big story (or these weren't good keywords) in many countries.

Possibly pertinent thoughts:
A. Generically, people care more about those who're like them. Basically the queries are compatible with what seems intuitively evident - Indian Sikhs see themselves as having more in common with American Sikhs than American non-Sikhs do.
B. In principle one should normalize, since Aurora killed more people. I wouldn't know how, since in practice I doubt people have linear responses in search interest versus number of deaths.
C. The Aurora story had legs, since the guy was caught, then dyed his hair, went to court etc. And he booby-trapped his house. Plus he chose his site well, since everyone watching the Batman movie would find out about the story and get interested. Basically inasmuch as he was looking for attention, he did a good job. The Gurudwara guy instead killed himself like an idiot. Let this be a lesson to us all - suicide is never the answer.
D. The Aurora shooter is inscrutable since at least so far it's hard to figure out what he was thinking or what went wrong. Whether your particular hobby horse is mental health, or the anomie and isolation characteristic of technological life, or the fate of the losers of sexual revolution, or bullying, there's ample fodder for speculation. By contrast, the logic of the Gurudwara shooter was apparent from the start. What's inexplicable attracts more search queries.

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's a business / person ...

Didn't Mitt Romney know that if he ran for the highest office of the nation, his personal taxes were going to be of some interest to voters and the media? Of course he did. But for some reason Romney has decided that it may do less harm to his candidacy if he were to brazen it out by not disclosing but a minuscule portion of his past tax returns than allow Americans to get a glimpse of his finances. His secretiveness has naturally given rise to much speculation as it deviates from the norm set by most past presidential candidates, including Romney's own father, of disclosing several years worth of tax documents. One thought is that the Romneys, despite their enormous wealth, may have paid very low taxes over the years compared to the average wage earner with far less income. It has also been suggested that there may have been some years when Romney paid no taxes.

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada dropped a bombshell recently by declaring publicly that he has learnt from a reliable source that indeed Romney paid zero taxes for ten years during a period from the late 1990s to the early 2000s. Romney challenged Reid to reveal his source ("put up or shut up") and some Republican congressmen have called the Democratic Senate Majority Leader a liar. But as of yesterday, Reid was sticking by his assertions, adding that his source is a Republican with inside knowledge of Bain Capital, Romney's company. Now there is speculation about the identity of Reid's "source." The Daily Kos is reporting that it may be one of the two Huntsmans - father & son, both Jon, both ex-governors of Utah and Junior a past rival of Romney for the GOP presidential ticket. (If true, this may turn out to be a high power Mormon conspiracy / grudge fest. Reid, the Huntsmans and Romney are all Mormons. The Huntsmans are said to be friendly with Democrat Reid but can't stand Romney, their own party's candidate)

Whatever we find out (or don't) about Romney's tax returns between now and November, may be up to how much pressure the media and the Obama campaign can bring to bear on the Romney camp and the latter's ability to withstand it. But for now, it doesn't look like Romney has made a coherent or convincing case as to why he should not make more of his tax returns public. Here is a report in the Washington Post.

The man who once said “corporations are people” apparently doesn’t believe the inverse.

When pressed on why he’s not releasing more tax returns in an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Mitt Romney justified it by saying: “I’m not a business.”

Bloomberg asked Romney whether, if he was investing in a company, he would want to see more than two years of financial reports, likening that process to the American people electing a president. But Romney suggested the standards aren’t the same for people and businesses.

“I’m not a business,” he said. “We have a process in this country, which was established by law, which provides for the transparency which candidates are required to meet. I have met with that requirement with full financial ­disclosure of all my investments, but in addition have provided and will provide a full two years of tax returns.”

This is the candidate who, almost exactly one year ago, got into a somewhat-heated exchange with a heckler in Iowa in which Romney made that case that “corporations are people” — that is, what happens to corporations affects the people who work for them.

“Of course they are,” Romney said at the time. “Everything corporations earn
also goes to people.”

So according to Romney, a person is not a business but a business is a person for tax purposes. Ah well. I guess that can be defined as opportunistic logic. I have been wondering about something else. During this time when hot words are being exchanged between Reid, Romney and some GOP politicians, one prominent Republican who may know more about this matter than anyone outside Bain Capital's accounting office, has maintained total silence. John McCain had vetted Romney as a possible running mate in 2008 at which time he examined twenty three years worth of Romney's tax returns. McCain has not said a word against Reid or in favor of Romney. 

Forward into the Past

Sanjukta Paul on the exploitative business practice of classifying workers as independent contractors -over at the Frying Pan blog. (This is part I of a three part article; part II and III will be added as they appear)

The turban as target: why split hairs?

Since 9/11/2001, while Muslims have been subjected to official suspicion by governmental agencies, American Sikhs, more than any other group, have faced random violence unleashed by individual patriotic vigilantes. Yesterday's shooting at the Oak Creek Gurudwara near Milwaukee is being treated as domestic terrorism and a hate crime by the FBI. The killer is dead, shot by the police. So we may never know what motivated his rampage. The speculation is that it was a case of mistaken identity and that the gunman may have wished to kill Muslims but mistook the turbaned and bearded Sikh men as co-religionists of the now deceased Osama Bin Laden, the most notorious man with a turban and a beard that many Americans identify as their quintessential enemy. Sikhs of course, are not Muslims and it would still be a heinous hate crime if they were. But do such fine distinctions matter to a rage filled hater? Would he have killed anyway because Sikhs reminded him of Al Qaida and the Taliban and the physical symbols of otherness were enough for him to go berserk?  See Amardeep Singh's thoughtful commentary on the matter.