Skip to main content

A Feeling when Techological Device is Withdrawn


 
Tech withdrawl Feel at 0200 am | 13-05-2017| Dubai Airport
Business Class | Emirates | Mumbai – Dubai – Seattle – Anchorage
 


First time in many years I find myself devoid of any electronic device on person. Thanks to the ban on taking any electronic device to the USA means your laptop, your iPad and your mobile phone, yes if it is a phone that is bigger that 16 cm have been neatly bubble wrapped and will transported in a separate packet which I need to collect at Seattle. A full 14:30 hours flight without a mobile phone feels a little odd may be that is the only reason I am using a pen and paper top make my notes. For once I felt that may be my son should have purchased a smaller phone for me, or may be I should have carried an extra smaller phone as a backup!

Frankly though I have not realized it – a mobile phone has been part of me for a very long time that I suddenly am suddenly feeling a sense of insecurity, a sense of something missing and a feeling that words don't seem to capture. It is odd to think that may be 10 years ago I did not own a mobile phone and now it is again the same. Then I did not feel a thing when I traveled, it was perfectly alright to travel minus a mobile phone, you were not in touch with anyone when you in a 14 hrs journey so what is the big deal now? I think the main reason is one of dependence. What if I had not owned a phone now? May be the kind of feeling that I have now would have not been felt.

Thinking of it – while technology brings you a lot of efficiency, if you get used to it and if that technology is withdrawn from you – you feel lost. I think that is my feeling as I write this. Will this have an impact on me? Time will tell.

My immediate thoughts are when I was asked to deposit my mobile phone was I should have not flown through Dubai, take a direct flight into USA, do not travel to USA. Never did it occur to me that I should have owned a smaller sized phone! Anyway I guess one needs to learn the art of travel!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Visualizing Speech Processing Challenges!

Often it is difficult to emphasize the difficulty that one faces during speech signal processing. Thanks to the large population use of speech recognition in the form of Alexa, Google Home when most of us are asking for a very limited information ("call my mother", "play the top 50 international hits" or "switch off the lights") which is quite well captured by the speech recognition engine in the form of contextual knowledge (it knows where you are; it knows your calendar, it know you parents phone number, it knows your preference, it knows your facebook likes .... ). Same Same - Different Different:   You speak X = /My voice is my password/ and I speak Y= /My voice is my password/. In speech recognition both our speech samples (X and Y) need to be recognized as "My voice is my password" while in speaker biometric X has to be attributed to you and and Y has to be attributed to me! In this blog post we try to show   visually   what it means to pro

BITS Pilani Goa Campus - Some Useful Information

You have cleared the BIT Aptitude Test and have got admission to BITS Pilani Goa Campus. Congratulation . Well Done. This is how the main building looks! Read on for some useful information, especially since you are traveling for the first time to the campus and more or less you will face the same scenario that we faced! We were asked report on 29-Jul-2018 (Sunday) to take admission on, 30-Jul-2018.  We reached Madgoan (we traveled by train though the airport is pretty close to the BITS campus, primarily to allow us to carry more luggage!)at around 0700 hours (expect a few drizzles to some good rain - so carry an umbrella) on 29-July-2019. As you come out you will be hounded by several taxi drivers, but the best is to take the official pre-paid taxi. It should cost you INR 700 to reach the BITS campus. We had booked a hotel in Vasco (this is one of the closest suburb from BITS campus, a taxi should charge you around 300-350 INR; you will make plenty of trips!) and

Authorship or Acknowledgement? Order of Authors!

 {Personal views} Being in an R&D organization means there are several instances when you have to write (Scientific or Technical Papers) about what you do in peer reviewed conference or journals.Very often, the resulting work is a team effort and as a consequence most papers, written today, have multiple authors.  Few decades ago, as a research scholar, it was just you and your supervisor as the two sole authors of any output that came out of the PhD exploration. This was indeed true, especially if you were writing a paper based on your ongoing research towards a PhD. In the pre-google days, the trend was to email the second author (usually the supervisor) to ask for a copy of the paper so that you could read the research and hopeful build on it because you knew that the supervisor would be more static in terms of geo coordinates than the scholar.   However the concept of multiple authors for a research article is seeping into academic research as well. These days labs write papers