Facebook is now mainstream in India. It has seen 2.1 crore unique Indians visitors in July. The rival Orkut had two crore visitors and thus in July, there were a total of over four crore Indian visitors on these social networking sites.

The numbers are just too big to ignore and the company is in the process of launching its office in Hyderabad. This will be the social networking giant’s 10th international office, which will provide support for sales and multi-lingual operations.

Not so social after all

As the Facebook blog said: “The new offices come at a significant time in our international growth. Seventy per cent of the people using Facebook are outside the US and are accessing the service from more than 70 languages. In India alone, we’ve seen rapid growth and now have more than 8 million (eighty lakh) people there actively connecting on Facebook with their friends, family, and other people they know, both within India and around the globe.”

You could say that Facebook has truly arrived in India when a friend narrated a story of how his sister had sent him and her other brothers Rakhi greetings, not by calling, or otherwise, but on Facebook!

I am on both Facebook and Orkut. When I first became active, there was the flush of connecting with friends who had moved away and discovering much about their lives. Eventually came the realisation that many had moved on. Of course, the shared memories were wonderful to cling on to and revive contact, but soon I realised that I was spending too much time on these sites and I cut it down. Ironically, since I was an early user, this came at a time when the site was gaining popularity among people I knew, and they used to get upset that I had not responded to their friend requests or commented on their status. It took time, but now my friends have got used to my sporadic presence on these sites.

While researching on chatting at the start of this century, I logged on to a chat site and within days I found that I was just glued on to my commuter and ignoring other things, trying to dismiss people fast when they called on me and behaving in various other obnoxious ways. I soon realised that this was because I had started missing the high of being connected, and was well on a fast road to chat addiction. Within a week, the article finished, I logged out, and stayed logged out.

The downside of the “anywhere, anytime” mantra adopted by the communications industry has resulted in a deluge of data that affects how people think and behave, both individually and collectively. Today’s smart phones are virtually computers, with good processing power, high-speed Internet connections and cameras. Earlier this month, Yujuan Bao, a Facebook engineer, wrote in his blog that 30 per cent of the more than 500 million Facebook users are using a mobile device to access the site.

I recently met a young mother who said that she would “die” without her Facebook. At a dinner where we were together, she checked out her phone and updated her status on Facebook frequently, much to the annoyance of her mother, and irritation of the other guests.

All this tires the brain of the person who is deluged with data. A recent article by Matt Richtel in The New York Times quoted a study at the University of Michigan, USA, which “found that people learned significantly better after a walk in nature than after a walk in a dense urban environment, suggesting that processing a barrage of information leaves people fatigued.” Even though people feel entertained, even relaxed, when they multitask while exercising, or pass a moment at the bus stop by catching a quick video clip, they might be taxing their brains, according to scientists. “People think they’re refreshing themselves, but they’re fatiguing themselves,” said Marc Berman, a University of Michigan neuroscientist.

There is an incessant urge to “stay in touch” and it takes its toll. A friend recently narrated a conversation with his daughter. While travelling back from a party, she wanted to check her mail and used her father’s phone. “Look, how easy technology has made our life,” she said. “See, how it has shaved off our 10 minutes of the time we would have been conversing as a family,” replied the father.

How often do you walk into a coffee shop or a restaurant and see someone alone, just sitting and waiting? He or she would be fidgeting with a mobile phone, checking on e-mail or updating a status. Even during theatre performances, you will see the bright blue batons of those who find it impossible to enjoy something they have paid for, and fail to see the anti-social nature of action.

When you try to do too many things at the same time, you lose focus. Now, this should be a no-brainer. Try to tell that to someone who is texting while watching TV, or answering an e-mail while talking to another person, and someone who is juggling many, many tabs on his browser, trying to soak in information from everywhere. We have the multi-tasking myth. We believe that we can multitask, and that women are better at it than men. But are we doing some tasks well, or just doing more things badly? I, for one, feel that it is the latter. So, I love Facebook, but slot out my time on it, and when I am on Facebook, I concentrate on what I am doing. I feel that this makes my activity more meaningful. Would you agree?

This article by Roopinder Singh was published in the Lifestyle section of The Tribune on September 1, 2010.

When I first opened an e-mail account in the 1990s, it was a Hotmail account. I used to receive forwards from my friends, which I would actually open, read and spend time over. This was because of the novelty of the whole thing, we got so few emails every day that even something from an anonymous source was welcome.

Forward with care

How the time has changed. Today, at the top of the list of things that I just don’t want others to share with me are e-mail forwards. It’s not that I have something against them as such. We all get forwards and often we send forwards to others, but I am acutely conscious of the how much of a waste of resources they can be.

Some forwards are cute, but many make assertions, which are at unverifiable and often malicious. Heard about the latest offer from Microsoft that sounds too good to be true? It is. I also take exception to mails that say: “Please FORWARD to everyone you know”. Sometimes, bad grammar and spelling is enough to alert me to Google it and find out more about the mail.

Got a mail that says, “This is not a hoax?” I would not bet my money on it. When I get a forward, I am curious to know if it is true. I want to test the claims being made by an anonymous stranger who sent the mail to my friend and me. Often when a mail makes a claim that I suspect, I go to one of websites that track down such things.

Snopes is a common default. Searching the content of the mail on “Snopes” often exposes a fake email as an urban legend. Another site, “Truth or Fiction” also exposes latest hoaxes, as does “Hoax Slayer”.

Why do I go through this exercise? Because sometime I like a mail, I want to forward it to my friends, but I want to ensure that what I am sending is true. They will believe that because I sent it, the information must be correct, and thus my credibility is at stake here.

Now that I have found that the mail is OK, and I want to forward it, I still have some precautions to take. I click the “Forward” link in my web mail so that I have full editorial control over the mail and clean it before I sent it out.

What does that mean? Well, it means that I first change the subject and remove FW:….. automatically comes when you forward any e-mail. Sometimes, you see FW: FW: FW: which shows how many times the mail has been forwarded. On such a mail, the information is also repeated. I delete all that is not required so that my friends do not have to waste their time.

I also remove all the email addresses of other people who received the mail before me. I do not want their addresses circulating on the Net. I then send the mail to myself and use the BCC: (blind carbon copy) field for listing the e-mail addresses. This way those who receive the mail don’t see other addresses, and I preserve the privacy of my friends.

What is it that I never forward or reply to? Chain letters, including those which portend to be about a cause, the email petitions. Why? An email petition talks about an issue and asks for your support by forwarding it to your friends. You do so, and thus add to a chain letter that contains hundreds, at times thousands of addresses, which can be harvested by spammers and others with malicious intent. Email petitions do not work and they just are a great scam.

My friends Gupi and Mandy send me forwards. They are often interesting and I like going thought them.

Recently, Gupi asked me: “How did you like my forward?” I happily admitted that I enjoyed it. “I knew you would,” he retorted, “I only send you selected ones, which I know will be of interest to you.”

Now, that’s the kind of sharing I love, in which the person has taken care of your interest and protected your privacy. That’s what we should all be like.

This article by Roopinder Singh was published in the Lifestyle section of The Tribune on April 17, 2010

Roopinder Singh

Is nothing private online any longer? I am sure there is, but two major blows were struck to the perception of online privacy recently, and we should all take note of these events because they have, rather should have, a lot of impact on our lives.

Wikileaks came online in 2006. An Australian, Julian Assange, runs this international organisation that publishes leaks of documents that are not available otherwise. This Sweden-based body preserves the anonymity of its sources. This year, it has been in the news twice. In April, it posted a video titled “Collateral Murder” which showed an American helicopter shooting down what turned out to be Afghan civilians. Last week, it released the “Afghan War Diary”, in which more than 90,000 documents were opened to the general public about the war in Afghanistan.

The American government is incensed at the leak, the FBI is looking into it, and the US Secretary of State has condemned Wikileaks for ‘endangering the lives of soldiers’, but Wikileaks promises to post more documents in the near future.

Another event that shook the online world was the release of personal data of more than 100 million Facebook users. This accounts for 20 per cent of the members of the world’s most popular social networking site. Facebook announced on July 21 that it had 500 million users, up from 150 million at the start of 2009, and the question is not if it will have a billion users one day, it is when this will happen.

A company called Skull Security released the file that has publicly accessible information of the users, including their names and profile addresses, to point out vulnerabilities in privacy controls of the site. No doubt the private information of these individuals was not compromised, however, Facebook is being disingenuous when it says: “Similar to the white pages of the phone book, this is the information available to enable people to find each other, which is the reason people join Facebook.”

According to experts, the data “takes one massive step out of the equation for advertisers-finding and aggregating the data of millions of users who are searching for information on younger people,” who, incidentally, are a vast majority of Facebook users. And Facebook founder and boss Mark Zuckerberg has defended the sharing of data with advertisers on the grounds that it keeps the site free for users. It is safe to assume that few, if any, of the users of Facebook would have thought that even the public data that they posted could be valuable to advertisers, and could thus be trolled.

Soon after the announcement, I asked my son if he had changed his password. “We all knew about it in school and my friends and I changed the passwords. I have also deleted all the mail in my inbox,” he said.

At one point, I had seen his profile and those of some of his friends, and found that most of them had fairly strict privacy settings, something that is rare on Facebook. Many people tend to go for the default settings on Facebook, and don’t bother to change them to more private ones. Also, there is a widespread perception among youngsters that they are anonymous, since no one would be interested in them anyway.

They are wrong. What they do, how they go about it, what interests them, all is valuable information for marketers and others whose livelihood depends on identifying new trends and feeding them.

Many people are unaware of the amount of information that Facebook shares with others. When they enrol for various forums or games, or gifts, etc, they should be careful about letting the applications that they use access their data. Also Facebook, when it updated its privacy settings, did so without due caution, as a result of which some users’ settings reverted to the default ‘public’ options.

Just how powerful is Facebook? Here is what The Economist said recently: “A couple of months or so after becoming Britain’s Prime Minister, David Cameron wanted a few tips from somebody who could tell him how it felt to be responsible for, and accountable to, millions of people: people who expected things from him, even though in most cases he would never shake their hands.

“He turned not to a fellow head of government but to…Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and boss of Facebook, the phenomenally successful social network…. In a well-publicised online video chat this month, the two men swapped ideas about ways for networks to help governments. Was this just a political leader seeking a spot of help from the private sector-or was it more like diplomacy, a comparison of notes between the masters of two great nations?”

As of now, this comparison is a cyber illusion, but it is illustrative of how the overlap between cyberspace and real human interaction is growing. Thus, to get back to my favourite theme, cyber space is an extension of the real world, and actions in cyber space have real consequences.

Cyber users must be careful about what they put online. Please remember that anything you post can be public. Therefore, you must be careful about what you let out in the public. What goes online has a life and a momentum of its own. It can turn up at the most awkward of times, say when you are about to get job, or your potential (cyber-savvy) father-in-law is checking you out.

In the real world, what you do is often forgotten after a while, especially if it is something stupid and momentary. Online, everything that you do is there for people to see, and most often, it is your friends. Sometimes friends too turn into enemies, and you really don’t want to empower them, do you? If you think that something you are doing online is embarrassing, then don’t do it. For God’s sake, don’t post anything unless you really want it to be public. Online privacy is not quite dead, but actually, it is not quite there too, as the recent Facebook episode shows.

The article was published in the Lifestyle section of The Tribune on August 3, 2010

Roopinder Singh

Bits about Bytes

When we learn, we generally use a step-by-step progression and this process of thought is known as linear thinking. We progress in a single direction through regular steps or stages, sequential. In our pursuit of knowledge, there are times we want to take detours, learn more about things that we come across and take the road less travelled…we want to indulge in non-linear learning.

Hyper card, an Apple software programme that allowed you to connect cards linking various pieces of information was the rage near the end of the 1980s. It was such an exiting time, since the programme allowed information to be presented in a way that was not linear, and thus added depth.

The Internet is the best example of the use of hyperlinking, since it allows a reference to a document that the reader can directly follow. The hyperlink points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. Hypertext is text with hyperlinks.

As we progress in the world of knowledge, we learn that it can’t be compartmentalised into neat little subjects, but is actually interconnected in ways that often astound us. Recently, Chandigarhians were treated to a unique event, (courtesy the Chandigarh Lalit Kala Akademi and Arun Nehru, the son of the late Mr B K Nehru), Professor Bulent Atalay’s lecture on ‘Leonardo’s Universe’.

Professor Atalay is the author of Math and the Mona Lisa and Leonardo’s Universe. He is, the Washington Post says, ‘a true Renaissance man – an artist, archaeologist and scientist’. His education includes BS, MS, MA, PhD and postdoctoral studies, completed at Georgetown, Princeton, University of California-Berkeley, and Oxford University.

He is a professor of Physics at the Mary Washington College of the University of Virginia, deeply interested in art. The focus of his particular attention is Leonardo da Vinci, whom he calls a transformational genius. Like many ancient men of knowledge, Leonardo (April 15, 1452 – May 2, 1519) was a person whose expertise spans a significant number of different subject areas. He was an Italian polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer.

Leonardo’s unbound curiosity matched his powers of invention. Although only a few of his paintings survive, he is considered to be one of the greatest painters the world has seen and is regarded as the most talented person ever. His notes have design of a helicopter, submarine, and a telescope – hundreds of years before anyone else conceived them.

Prof Atalay’s lecture was a fine example of a non-linear experience in which anecdotes, algorithms and art were played out in various measures. He had the standing-room only audience at the Government Art Museum eating out of his hands, even when they didn’t fully understand him… like when he spoke about Fibonacci numbers, where every number in the sequence (after the second) is the sum of the previous two numbers: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, …. Eventually, the Fibonacci numbers lead to the Golden Ratio: ? = 1.618 033, which has been used by architects and artists to produce objects of great beauty.

For many in the audience, the Fibonacci numbers needed some explaining. An art student sitting next to me Googled it on her mobile phone, and soon we had the answer, we, because she let me have a look at it too. It was great, because the experience became richer.

Time flew by and the lecture lasted longer than we expected. Prof BN Goswamy gave an Indian perspective in his lucid comments and I came back with a copy of Professor Atalay’s book. As he autographed it, I told him: “Your lecture will stay in our minds for a long time, and this book will refresh it.”

The book, brilliantly produced by National Geographic, became my companion that night and the next day, but after I read it, I wanted more, and guess what, I Googled and another world of information opened in front of it.

Since this was browsing in the real sense of the term, I went of excursions, hopped from one site to another, from one facet to another fact about the genius that was Leonardo Da Vinci. As often happens, Wikipedia became an important starting point, of a journey that lead through the Web Museum, Paris, Professor Atalay’s website, which is a fine multi-media experience with sound  and a blog in the National Geographic website . For those who missed his lecture, please catch them at YouTube.

I am determined to go on more such journeys. The clicks of the computer’s mouse, and a hyperlinked world of the Internet often come together to give me a sense of exploring the thrilling universe of knowledge, which is both empowering and invigorating. All thanks to hyperlinking.

This article was printed in Lifestyle section of The Tribune on July 21, 2010.

Parents must keep an eye on their children’s online activities

Roopinder Singh

Exploring a new world is certainly going to fill us with excitement, trepidation, thrill and a whole bouquet of emotions. For many children, the latest frontier is the cyber world. They explore it, discuss it, use it, share their feelings online … it is the world which they are totally a part of.

Often, I am called when people want to buy a computer, or discuss something about their children’s behaviour on computers. This summer vacation was also a similar situation, another time when I made myself somewhat unpopular with the children.

Where should a computer be in the house? “In a public area,” is my answer, one that often displeases children. I am among the parents who advocate placing the computer in a family room. Thus, the child is aware that he should not do anything, which he does not want his parents or siblings to know about.

When this is not possible for some reason, if the computer has to be kept in a child’s bedroom, make sure that the door of the room is kept open while the computer is on. This helps keep chatting and browsing activities in check. This simple advice is something that I believe in, and have advocated in my writing for many years now.

When children complain about privacy issues, my answer is simple: “Are you doing something that is wrong? If not, there’s nothing to worry about. No one’s going to be reading your letters or whatever, just keeping an eye on you overall activity.”

The Norton Online Family report, which has been released recently, says 70 per cent of Indian adults are in favour of giving children control over their own online activities. I disagree. The control should be in the parents’ hands and online usage must be governed with rules.

Naturally, being a computer-friendly parent helps, since you can share your experiences and understand what a child wants. To get back to the report, around 68 per cent of Indian parents say they have house rules in place surrounding their child’s use of the Internet, but only 34 per cent have actually set parental controls on their family computer. As many as 500 adults and 200 children, between eight to 17 years, were surveyed in India.

While 76 per cent of Indian children say they are more careful about their online activities than their parents, the report says: “Most Indian kids do not follow common sense rules while online.” That’s where you come in. Please sit down with your children and tell them that they should not give their e-mail IDs, addresses and telephone numbers to strangers on the Net.

Today, social networking sites and chat are a major part of online behaviour. You must encourage your children to let you know if they feel uncomfortable about the behaviour of anyone they are in contact with through their Facebook, Orkut or other accounts. Of course, they should not make an appointment, or talk to someone they have met on the Net without the parents’ approval.

The Norton report says that 77 per cent of Indian children have experienced some negative situation online but only 50 per cent of the Indian parents thought their children had such experiences. What are these negative experiences? Violent images, pornography, threat from strangers on social networking and other form of harassment on the Internet is seen as negative content for kids between eight years and 17 years.

While 92 per cent of Indian children say they follow their family’s rules for the Internet, remember, this is what they say, not what they do. Also, 24 per cent have done something online that they have later regretted. A shocking 83 per cent of the children said they “downloaded a virus”.

Specific software that warns parents if sexually explicit words etc are used can also help, but it is not a substitute for keeping a watchful eye. In any case it is a difficult balancing act. You want to keep an eye on your child, and at the same time you really don’t want to snoop.

You may feel that the Internet grants anonymity to its users. You often tend to go overboard if you feel that you cannot be identified. This is an illusion as most of the Internet users can be accurately pinpointed.

Sometimes, children feel that they can communicate better with anonymous persons rather than those who see and judge them everyday-their parents, peers and teachers. The elders have to make the effort to communicate with the children so that they do not feel the need to find empathy in cyberspace.

Chatting on the computer has become common, and it needs attention from both parents and children. The written word often has more importance than the spoken one, but somehow people think that if they write online, their words don’t matter much. Thus, you have mangled expressions, which can be tolerated, and also mangled thoughts, which are far less tolerable, and can come back to haunt those who expressed them years later.

What goes into cyberspace has a surprisingly long life, which can be embarrassing. Thus, you need to be careful. A website that educates both the parents and the children about chat room perils is www.chatdanger.com.

The Internet opens the world-parents and children must work together to ensure that a can of worms is not served along with the rich diet of information, communication and entertainment that is a staple of the Net.

This column was published in the Lifestyle section of The Tribune on July 6, 2010.

BITS ABOUT BYTES

Roopinder Singh

iPhone 4 is here and as usual it was all over the media; it’s slimmer, has a 100 improvements over the last model, the battery lasts longer and in short, you MUST have it. “What will I do with my iPhone that I can’t do with my phone?” asked my wife.

Now, she is much into phones, had a smart phone years ago when they were rare, expensive, and weighed a tonne, and thanks also to Jansher, our son, is more than usually cued in about matters electronic. The query was more rhetorical than actual, since she knew the specs of the new phone as any well-informed tech-savvy person.

I was stumped. None of the things that I said seemed to be convincing enough reason for a new purchase, till I hit the nail in the head, more due to exasperation than thought, and said: “It just the way they do it.”

Now, that set us thinking. We had struggled in the morning on the Indian Railways website, among the most visited websites in India, trying to book Shatabdi tickets to Delhi and back, but finally giving up after many frustrating delays. Now, this is something that I have done in the past, so it is not that I was unfamiliar with the process, but the site is a good example of a counter intuitive functioning, and despite some recent improvements, retains the unmistakably tied in the blue ribbon of the morbid bureaucracy. By the afternoon, she had booked the tickets, through a travel website that was friendly and fast.

Our user experience on any website is governed by its navigation. As we navigate the site, we either bless the persons who thought of what we would be doing and made it easier for us to do it, or get exasperated with the way the website is done. We would, therefore, avoid it as much as possible in the future, and ignore its existence if we can.

When we use computers and electronic devices, the place where interaction between humans and machines occurs is called user interface. Any machine is designed to do certain tasks, but in the case of machines that we use constantly, what sets one apart from the other, everything else being equal, is the fact that we interact better with some machines than other. The fact is that a lot of thought and attention must go into just how this interaction takes place. It is not only we who are interacting with the machine; it is the way the machine has been set up to interact with us.

In this specialised field, the website we were talking about failed, whereas others passed, as a result of which they got our business. Now, by now, long-time readers might have realised that I am among those ancient numbers who have actually worked on computers that did not have user interfaces, the DOS kinds. It is another matter that in India we often have computers that still run on them!

When the Mac came out, it was just a phenomenon like no others. In the mid 1980s, we unpacked it straight out of the box, plugged it in, and my first story was filed that very evening, printed out on a dot-matrix printer with a font called Chicago. The machine had a nine-inch black and white screen, and as the joke went, even if you thought about opening it, the Apple warranty was void.

What a great user experience it was! WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) was a huge leap over the “control codes” equivalent to today’s “mark-up codes” that had to be inputted into the typesetting machines and computers that preceded the graphic user interfaces that we are familiar with today.

Apple was not the first GUI computer; in fact, it got its GUI under license from Xerox Alto, but took the lead, and retained certain elegance in the way the GUI was executed, even as eventually Windows garnered the market share.

Apple operating system has a certain verve that makes it the favourite of creative people. Even though it has a small market share its influence on the way people use computers is undeniable. Windows GUI is inspired by the Apple OS, as is much of what we use in computers today.

Rajiv Kaul has been in love with his Apple iPhone since he got it. He takes pictures with it, uses it for communication, and much, much more. A person who was totally a Windows man, he is a partner in a company that designs graphic interfaces for software firms. They recently worked on software that helps prepare students for the SAT exams.

“Whenever we went abroad, we were told to get a Mac-like feel in our design. So we got ourselves Mac computers, and then saw the difference,” he says.

It’s just the way they do it. Technical details are important, but they are a tip of the iceberg that is Apple iPhone. What sets it apart, like other Apple products, like iPod, iPad and not to forget, the Apple’s computers, both desktop and laptop – is the whole experience, including the hype!

The article was published in the Lifestyle section of The Tribune on June 22, 2010.

BITS ABOUT BYTES

Roopinder Singh

Facebook was banned in Pakistan recently. Now the government has restored the service. Who won, actually, nobody.

The social networking site had come under fire for a competition featuring caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. Now, in Islam, no pictorial representation of Prophet Mohammad is allowed and such an act is considered blasphemous. No one has any doubt that the Facebook page was a blatant provocation, intended to cause controversy. The page showed caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad and other religions figures, including those from Hinduism and Christian.

The sensitivity of Islam to illustrations depicting Prophet Muhammad is well-known, more so since the publication of 12 editorial cartoons by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005, which resulted in a violent and furious reaction.

A page grab of Facebook

Facebook’s tardy reaction to the concerns expressed by Pakistani authorities is inexplicable, since Pakistan alone has 20 million Internet users, a sizable number. It is not as if Facebook has never removed pages that offend; it does do so from time to time, more so in response to requests by sovereign nations.

To cite just one recent well-documented incident, in December 2009, Facebook shut down a fan page for Massimo Tartaglia, the man who hit Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi with a statuette of the Milan cathedral. In the less than 48 hours before it was closed won, the page had almost one lakh users.

Initially, Facebook reportedly responded to Pakistani concerns by saying that the page did not violate its policies, even though they state that “obscene content and the triggering of hate material toward any group, individual, or religion will be banned and removed”.

Dialogue and engagement are always the best ways to get over a situation of conflict. Pakistan has a vibrant Internet community, and this is the time for it to show to the world that it has the intellectual and communicative skills to taken on the challenges posed by the brief ban on Facebook. Too often we condemn others and withdraw into our shells rather than explain our point of view to them.

Banning a website to block a page is often a case of over-reaction, whether it is by the Pakistani authorities who reacted recently, or the Indian attempt to ban 18 blogs that posted extremist views, after the July 11, 2006 Mumbai bomb blasts. The collateral damage, in the form of blocking legitimate activity over the Internet, is simply too great. During the Kargil conflict in 1999, India had banned the site of the Pakistani newspaper, Dawn, and action that I then criticised as a knee-jerk reaction. What is the point of blocking something that remains accessible even after it is banned?

While I criticise banning websites, I am also critical of the fact that freedom of speech is often taken to mean that anything goes. This is not so. The cyber world is an extension of the real world, it is another dimension of our normal social interaction, and as such the normal rules of conduct evolved for the civilised world do apply to it.

Thus the site that posts offensive material is, to my mind, should face the consequences of its actions. Facebook should have faced some kind of sanction for posting something that is deeply offensive to millions of people.

Many of the Internet companies were started by geeks at a very young age. The world does not conform to their idealist and somewhat restricted view. The success and tremendous growth of these companies brings makes them a great force with incredible power to change and indeed sometimes redefine social borders in the world. Along with this comes responsibility and the need for caution.

Facebook.com is the leading Website in the world with 540 million unique users, according to Google, its rival. Facebook, reached 35.2 per cent of the total Internet population, and racked up 570 billion page views. Google’s new DoubleClick Ad Planner 1000 list places Yahoo.com, at number two, with 490 million unique visitors.

This is the time for Facebook to grow up. It is already under a fair deal of pressure regarding its privacy policy. People speak of Facebooking rather than e-mailing. The post their status, pictures, favourites, in fact major slices of their whole life, on Facebook. They are thus entitled to know that their privacy is in safe hands, and that the website they are entrusting so much to is a responsible one.When we ask someone to be responsible, we also tell them to have a sense of right and wrong, and to set some boundaries. That’s what grown up behaviour is. Google is only six years old in the conventional sense, but in Internet years, that’s a long, long time.

A message to Mark Elliot Zuckerberg, the 26-year-old founder of Facebook-Grow up. Your baby has grown. Please give it the wherewithal to negotiate the world it is growing up in it. A message for governments that ban Facebook and other social networking sites-don’t shoot the messenger, social networks reflect society, and if you have conflicts, engage those you are in conflict with, banning them just doesn’t work.

This article was printed in the Lifestyle section of The Tribune on June 1, 2010.

You may also like to read my previous columns by clicking here.

While sending photos to friends online, get sharp

BITS ABOUT BYTES

Roopinder Singh

The very essence of taking a picture involves sharing it with others. After all, what are photographs other than memories immortalised. Even as we compose a picture on our viewfinder, or, more often, on the LCD screen of our camera or phone, we are already thinking of people we would love to share the moment with.

But before we share the picture, we would like to make sure that we put our best foot forward. Since photography, as we saw in the last article (click here), is now largely digital, we often download the photographs we have taken from the camera to a personal computer.

The bigger screen of the PC helps us to view the pictures and it is not surprising that we can then find flaws. Often, the picture, especially if it has been taken with a cellphone or one of those smart, cute flat little cameras that you can slip into your purse or pocket, suddenly doesn’t seem as sharp as it did on the dinky little screen of the device.

The most common reason for that is not technical, but simply physical – camera shake. Your hand shakes as you take a picture and the image becomes blurred. While they look good, these cameras do not sit well in the hand, since they are not ergonomic.

When I had to buy a camera for Jansher, our son, I bought something that was not absolutely flat, and sat well in the hand; an Olympus SP-600UZ had a body with a curved end and sat well in the house. It has a 12 megapixel sensor and has a 15X zoom. Really good specs for a camera that a 14-year-old is going to use!

Like this camera, most mid-range cameras have image stability facility that counters a camera shake. It is fairly effective, but still, the best thing to do is to keep yourself steady, and even control your breathing for a few seconds while you press the shutter. In fact, I often find that childhood hunting skills come is very useful during photography, but that’s another story.

In the days of chemical photography it was practically impossible to fix a camera shake. When things get into the digital arena, like through scanning or directly uploaded from a camera, there are some software solutions, primarily the unsharp mask filter, which is actually a sharpening filter that emphasises the edges in the image, or the differences between adjacent light and dark sample points in an image. In expert hands, it is a tremendous tool, though a bit difficult to master. It is widely available in most image processing software.

Focus Magic, a photoshop a plug-in for Mac, and a stand-alone software for Windows, has quite a reputation for improving shaky pictures. Other plug-ins include Image Skill’s Magic Sharpener and a freeware utility called Unshake.

The Rolls Royce of image processing tools, Photoshop, is well, like the car, expensive, and it takes a while to master. I have been using it since it was first released for Apple computers in 1990 and I love its capabilities. It has many features and the new Creative Suites from Adobe offer much more than you can ever imagine, or use.

However, much of my basic stuff like cataloguing and even some touching up is done using a free software called Picasa, which I mentioned in my last column. It is easily downloadable, simple, uses less computing resources, and is great at cataloguing. I upload my pictures from my computer and see them Picasa. I even do some basic colour balance and retouching.

To share pictures online, I often use Flickr an image and video hosting website, owned by Yahoo since 2005. When I got involved a lot in the Vivek High School Soccer League as a parent photographer, I would take the pictures with my camera, a Nikon D-200 for those who want to know, and post the pictures on Flickr so that our son and his friends could check them out. Many bloggers also use Flickr; thought I use Picasa’s online version, Picasa Web Albums, to upload the pictures that I use in my blog, but it is a matter of personal preference, more than anything else.

Sometimes, we want to send photographs by e-mail. Most of the time camera generates really big files, which measure in MBs. Such files are of very good quality, but they take a long time to download, and are not convenient to see on a computer screen.

Most image processing programmes, including Picasa, allow you to prepare your pictures for the Web. By doing so, they decrease the quality and the file size, optimising it for sharing online and for viewing on a computer screen. Please remember that in case you want to print the pictures, you have to send the best resolution possible because the print shops need that resolution.

What happens to people who want the pictures for offline viewing? Well, as you walk into Mahijit Sodhi’s house, you notice that while the ambience is traditional, in various nooks and corners there are silent displays of pictures, changing every 30 seconds or so. These are digital picture frames, in various sizes.

Digital frames can be as small as 1.5-inch keychain displays and the biggest ones are 32-inch wall-mounted ones. However, most frames are in the 5″ to 15″ range. Most digital photo frames have Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) screens, and operate at a resolution of 720 x 480 pixels for a 7″ frame, and 1600 x 1200 pixels for those 15 inches and larger. They accept USB drives, memory sticks, or memory cards and thus you can keep adding your latest collections for display.

Many people want to hold a picture in their hands and for them, all you have to do is to upload your picture at the highest possible resolution and take it to your nearest photo processing shop to have it printed.

When you enlarge a picture too much, you will notice pixilation, or graininess in the print. The number of megapixels of the camera and the size of the CCD, coupled with the quality of the lens, all work together to give you better quality. Thus my Nikon D-200 gives better quality of pictures even though it is 10 megapixels as opposed to Jansher’s Olympus, which is 12 megapixels. Of course, the Nikkor 18-200mm DX VR lens helps a lot, too!

Photography is fun, but as you explore the world of pixels and computer algorithms, you learn much more and get involved in the technical aspects of picture taking, which makes it far easier to tweak your photographs, and share them with others, both electronically, as well as physically.

This article was printed in the Lifestyle section of The Tribune on May 18, 2010

It was a Mamiya medium format camera that triggered this article. The occasion was the 90th birthday celebration of Mahijit Singh Sodhi, one of the grand old men of Chandigarh.

Karam Sodhi examines the frame of his picture through the viewfinder of a Mamiya medium format camera. Photo: Avi Sodhi

His grandson, Karam, was making a valiant attempt to photograph the extended family of, well, around 90 people together and his tool of choice was this medium format camera that uses a film which I started my photography with – the 120-film that was used in the Agfa Click III cameras and the Yashika and Roliflex twin-lens reflex cameras, common in photo studios in the 1960s and 1970s.

Now, there were digital cameras galore at the wine and cheese evening. You could say that everyone had one, from the Nikon and Cannon digital SLRs to the ubiquitous cameras in phones, and as drinks circulated and the roasts were savoured, many flashes punctuated the darkening sky. A number of pictures were snapped, as often happens when people meet after a long time.

Why was the seemingly antediluvian film camera doing amidst all these snazzy digital ones? Well, it still holds true that practically nothing in the digital world can match the tonal range and even resolution of a film. A medium format film image can record an equivalent of approximately 50 megapixels. The 120-film dates back to 1902 and a century later, the best digital camera was made by a filmmaker, Fuji, and the FinePix S602Z Pro had a resolution of 6.0 mp. Top cameras have managed to double the resolution now.

The convenience of reducing light to binary digits, the bits (Binary digIT, i.e., 0 and 1) and bytes (8-bit bundles) that dominate the digital world is, however, undeniable. We can do so much more with pictures than we could do using the traditional chemical
methods.

Often comparisons in digital cameras have been reduced to the megapixel game, but this is not an accurate measure.

Megapixel (one million pixels) is a term used for the number of pixels in an image. It is also used to express the number of image sensor elements of digital cameras or the number of elements of digital displays. A pixel is generally defined as the smallest single component of a digital image. Instead of a film, digital cameras use photosensitive electronic image sensors. They can either be charge-coupled device (CCD) or complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS). These sensors have a large number of single sensor elements, often called pixels.

A colour film normally has three layers of emulsion and each layer is basically the same as in black and white film, but sensitive only to one-third of the spectrum (reds, greens or blues). Similarly, each pixel in the sensor will record only one channel (red, or green, or blue) of the final colour image.

When comparing cameras, one must look at the size of the sensor, and bigger is better in this instance. Just as the 120-film is three times size of a 35mm, the size of the CCD in compact cameras is much smaller than that in digital SLRs, which have only recently been able to give a “full frame” 35mm CCD.

The size of the CCD determines the size of the individual elements in it and the bigger the sensors, more the information they can store.

Most phones now have fairly acceptable pixels in their camera, yet the sale of compact digital cameras is booming. This is interesting, since most of the people who buy these cameras would have camera-equipped cell phones. This brings us to the fact that sensors are but one aspect of the camera.

The most important thing in a camera is arguably its lens. Normally made of glass, it can have one or many elements. SLR cameras have mounts on which a photographer can mount different lenses, depending on the situation and the effect that is desired.

Compact cameras, however, have only one kind of lens fitted to them. Most of them have a zoom feature, which allows you to change the frame of your picture without moving back and forth. Thus, you can go nearer the object or go wider to include more of the background without moving.

The range and optical quality of the lens plays a major role in the way the image is formed, and that’s the reason people pay thousands of rupees, even lakhs, for a high quality lens. My photo lab person says that most of the images that he processes daily come from digital cameras, not from films.

The wide-scale adoption of the digital medium means that storage of pictures has also moved from shoeboxes to computers and hard drives. Since, unlike film, digital pictures do not cost money to take, just to print, people tend to take more, and thus have many more to store, process and catalogue.

What use is a picture unless you can find it when you want to? On a computer, it can become difficult unless you have some sort of picture processing software. After long use, my favourite is Picasa, a software application for organising and editing digital photos.

The word Picasa is a blend of the name of famous Spanish painter, Pablo Picasso, the phrase ‘mi casa’ for “my house” and “pic” for pictures. It was created by Idealab, but Google bought it in 2004 and has since offered it as a free download. I have been using it since the beginning, and thousands of my digital pictures are catalogued via Picasa. The retouching and other functions are basic, though effective. The recently introduced face-recognition programme is fun, although sometimes intrusive.

Since on my phone I can store pictures of the callers, I have used the recognised and tagged faces from various pictures and exported them to the phone. Seeing a smiling face when you receive a call definitely puts you in a good mood to talk! Other photo organisers include Adobe’s Elements, Apple’s iPhoto, Novell’s F-spot, PicaJet and DigiKam. And you may want to try out these too.

When we take a picture, one of the primary reasons is that we want to share the moment with others. The people who took pictures at the party also shared them with others. How? Well, that’s what we will look at the next time!

The article was published in the Lifestyle section of The Tribune. It is the beginning of a fortnightly column.