SpiderSense or how to fake it: Trends in the Geospatial Space

Superhero’s spider sense is not working so uses his computer instead.


SuperHero: “Computer show me on the map if any of my friends are in danger”


How would the computer answer the above question? Is it even possible? Well a few years back the answer would have been no but today it would be a qualified “Maybe”. Let us look at a few technologies which have made this possible

• Real time Location Tracking
  
• Business Intelligence
  
• Cloud Computing
  
• Natural Language processing
  

How do these make the answer possible? Well first lets tackle cloud computing. With the advent of cloud computing it has become possible for folks to have access to large amounts of computing power at low cost. Of course here we are talking of a superhero who is not a multimillionaire like Batman but more of the garden variety working class Spiderman type who would still like to have on demand access to large amounts of computing power.


OK so we have low cost access to cheap computing power but it still does not tell us how to tell us where the superhero’s friends are or if they are in danger. First where are the hero’s friends? Well if they are carrying cellphones as almost anyone nowadays does then there are services like Google Latitude which can tell us (or the hero) where the friends are.


So next we come to how does the hero know they are in danger. Well suppose this hero does not have a spider sense but he does have a spatio-temporal database of crime statistics which tells him at which parts of the city and at what times crimes are high. He also is using sophisticated OLAP driven Business Intelligence software which is tracking when his friends are making purchases like jewellery (and then walking on dangerous streets) or alcohol (and then getting behind the wheel of their car. The cars lo-jack will tell the hero the car is moving and the friends cellphone will tell him the friend is in the car).


So now the hero knows his friend is in danger and he wants to do something about it but our hero is an efficient hero. He wants to know where he can fly to first so as to do the maximum good so the best and easiest way for him to see the answer is on a map and that is where he sees it on a GIS application deployed on a cloud computing platform like Windows Azure or Amazon S3 and driven by geospatial business intelligence such as GeoMondrian or Oracle Business Insight Suite.


And lastly our hero does not like sitting and typing and clicking so he would like to speak his questions and get his answers and that is what Natural Language Processing provides him (this is probably the biggest contributor to the maybe instead of a yes)


So now our superhero can simulate a spider sense and go help his friends but couldn’t you the average Joe do so too?


And suppose you are not out to save people but to sell to them (yeah I know its not so noble but a mans gotto live. A woman too).


And suppose instead of finding out where to go save people you want to figure out where to do an imprompto sales promotion. You would like to do it where it would have the maximum effect hence you need to make sure of the following


1) The area contains people who are your target audience aka friends


2) They have just indulged in activities which increase your chance of
selling to them. E.g. If they have just watched a romantic movie and
are taking a seaside walk instead of the car they might be interested
in brochures of diamonds to buy for their girlfriends


3) And you would like to do this in a focused manner instead of sending
out SMSs to the entire city


So you use your Geospatial Business Application to create a realtime map of areas with good sales targets and then on the fly set up a geofence so that all cell phones within the geofence receive a MMS with pictures of the diamonds/roses and an attached digital coupon for a 10% discount.


Now that’s just one small example of what is becoming possible. (Yes I cheated we did not talk to the computer but soon we shall be able to)


So what does it mean for companies in the GIS space. Well it means that GIS is becoming something common which is both good and bad – bad because the commodity creation of GIS data is no longer profitable as companies like Google are giving it away for free. However the cheap cost of GPS chips and integration with the worlds of Business Intelligence and Cloud computing are making new wondrous applications possible and opening opportunities for GIS companies to climb up the ladder to more value added applications.


Heres to hoping GIS will soon make all of us superheroes.

End of Dollar Imperialism?

Currently the entire world is an American colony. Some like Europe Britain and Japan have Commonwealth status but have the same head of state as the US. Sounds like the British Empire and its relation to Australia , Canada, NewZealand (commonwealth) and India(outright colony). Well thats because it is. The British empire was based on the British pound being the legal tender for trade in the commonwelath. The British would buy goods and raw materials from their colonies and in return pay with Pounds. As the colonies were taxed so much they could not buy anything British so the Pounds were held in Colonial office accounts in London and lent out to British businesses. Well after the 2 World Wars the British were bankrupt, the Euopeans and Chinese were devastated, the Japanese were radiated and the Russians had lost most of their young male population. The USA had come out unscathed from WW2 so it got to dictate the new world order. So they decided to not have the headache of administering direct colonies and just have indirect colonies via the Dollar. Hence the Breton Woods system under which the Dollar became the instrument of foreign trade. Imagine their outrage when the damn Russkies decided to use the Rouble for their trade with Eat European Countries. Hence the world was divided into 2- those who trade in dollars and those who trade in rubles and the Cold War was on. The Cold War was not strictly based on Communism vs Capitalism proof of which is the Communist Chinese and Yugoslavs were in the American dollar trading block while the Capitalist Indians were in the Ruble trading block. Well after the fall of the Russians(a job well done by the CIA. They were not always as incompetent as they were in Iraq) the dollar was king. USA and its citizens had a sweet deal. Consume as much as you want, borrow to consume and all you have to do is pay for it in dollars. Dont have any dollars because you didnt produce anything ? Just print more. What ? If you print more dollars the exchange rate of dollars will go down making imports expensive or the interest rate will go up making Credit cards expensive! NO!! The exchange rate will not go down as other countries need dollars to buy oil and to settle their trade so no matter how many dollars USA prints its exchange rate stays strong. And China needs to drive their economic growth through exports so they need to keep the Yuan weak against the dollar. So they will keep buying dollar treasuries keeping the interest rates low. Before the Chinese it was the Koreans and the Japanese who did the same and after the Chinese it will be the Vietnamese and the Indians. So a pretty sweet deal. But now the deal is coming to an end. The Chinese have raised the Bogey of replacing the Dollar with the SDR. Make no mistake the SDR is a red herring, afterall the IMF is controlled by the US so China has no real hope of getting the Yuan into the SDR which would give them too the right to print money. But the SDR issue helps to divert attention from the real fun part where China is busy signing currency swaps with countries from South Korea to Belarus to Argentina to settle international trade in Yuan. Yes you heard that right international trade without the dollar!! Once this becomes widespread enough the Yuan will become an international reserve currency and other nations will start holding yuan. As this would ensure a Soros cannot do a run on the Yuan China would no longer have to hold dollars. Once that happens thats the end of the free run and the dollar empire

Appropiate punishment

I have been following the Chinese Melamine in Milk scandal and wondering what would be an appropriate punishment for those who in their greed for fast profits caused kidney failures in infants. I would say force them to donate a kidney each (for those convicted shoot them and take both kidneys) or even more appropriately ; since adult kidneys cant be grafted on the infant victims, take the kidneys of the culprits' children. Let them use their ill-gotten profits to keep their children on dialysis for life. As you can tell THIS makes me very very angry.

Credit bailout and the nuclear deal

For those worried about Congress not having 30 days to vote on the nuclear deal hurray for the credit crisis. Congress may now stay on to pass the bailout law and that just might make it 30 days for the nuclear deal to get an up or down vote without amendments. Now the clincher for the conspiracy theorists - Did Westinghouse trigger the credit crisis?

How about a really modern Pentathlon?

The olympics are on and sports are on my mind. I find the Modern Pentathlon very interesting. Its origin is in the ancient pentathlon when competitors had to run,wrestle,long jump and throw a discuss and a javelin ; all skills needed by a Greek soldier. The modern pentathlon was created to test skills needed by a 20th century cavalry soldier behind enemy lines - fight with sword (epee fencing), pistol, ride an unfamiliar horse, swim and run cross country. Now while running and shooting are still essential skills for a soldier cant say the same about horse riding and fencing. How about a really modern pentathlon which would consist of cross country running with stops in between to shoot at targets ( you can take all the time you want to shoot but your clock on the run is ticking). This could be preceded by a 200 m snorkelling event ( sneaking up under water is something a modern soldier will prefer to swimming in). This could be preceded by a parachuting contest where you are judged on your accuracy in landing and the final event could be testing your skill at unarmed comabat - Judo, wrestling or Karate (choose one). So the complete sequence would be you jump out of a plane and maneovour your chute to land on a bullseye in the stadium. You then snorkel 200 m with penalties for surfacing. Based on these two events the next day you get your starting times in the cross country race cum shooting event ( the shooting could be sniper rifle or rapid fire pistol) Based on your ending times you get grouped into pairs for Judo so that 1 and 2 fight for the gold, 3 and 4 fight for the bronze and so on). If we want a heptathlon we could add Shotput to simulate throwing grenades and a separate rifle event to simulate sniping and have pistols in the cross country event.

Why China should build nuclear ships

That is Nuclear cargo ships. Its really simple when oil was 20$ a barrel the cost of shipping a container from Shanghai to the east coast was 3000 dollars but with oil at 120$ a barrel the cost has gone up to 8000 dollars (its not a direct multiple as ships have slowed down to save oil. So freight costs are not as high as they would be at the old speeds but the shipping times are higher and those costs do show up in other places like the cost of carrying inventory) In fact cost of shipping has gone up by so much that US steel made from Brazilian Ore in Pittsburgh at 40$ an hour labor is now cost competitive with steel made from ore exported from Brazil to China, processed at 1$ an hour and reimported to USA. As a result manufacturing has started to switch back to USA with furniture factories opening everyday in North Carolina. So how does this relate to Nuclear cargo ships like the ill fated NS Savannah? Well Nuclear cargo ships as the name suggests do not use oil and instead have nuclear reactors ala aircraft carriers. Now the NS Savannah when run in the 60s and 70s never saw a profit but that was the age of cheap oil and lax environmental regulations on oil ships. Also the Savannah was built as a goodwill demonstrator with of all things 10 passenger cabins and a swimming pool ( a swimming pool on a freighter?) Also the oil ships of the time could discharge their dirty ballast into harbors and did not have to use separate bunkers for low sulphur diesel when operating in port. In todays regulatory environment with high oil costs a nuclear cargo ship starts to look very nice. It could even be run at around 5000 dollars to ship a container from Shanghai to the east coast or even at 8000 dollars but in half the time ( unlike oil ships who are limited in their range and speed by the oil they can carry for nuclear ships all the fuel they will need for 30 years is put in at manufacture) by running much faster. That would mean it would still be economical for Walmart to import everything from across the world than to buy from local manufacturers even in an age of expensive oil. Hence I predict China building their own Nuclear cargo ships soon and also expect a loud outcry from so called US environmentalists(trade protectionists in disguise) against allowing Nuclear ships into US harbors (not that it will be so effective all China has to do is offload at Mexican ports and ship the rest of the way by train along the Trans Texas corridor)

The great petrol boondongle

Recently India has been abuzz with how the Oil Marketing companies are making huge losses and petrol prices need to be revised. I say hogwash. Lets look at petrol prices in USA a country which gives no subsidies on gas and has both federal and state government taxes. Gasoline (petrol as we call it in India) is 4 dollars a gallon. A gallon is 3.785 litres so its roughly 1.05 dollars a liter which works out to 44 Rupees a litre at 42 rupees to a dollar. So if gas with no subsidies can sell at 44 rupees in USA why does it need to be sold at 71 rupees (according to our great oil minister) to break even for the Oil Marketing companies. Just how inefficient are our OMCs? Actually Oil should cost even lesser in India than in USA for a variety of reasons. Firstly we are closer to the middle east so we spend less on hauling the crude here. Secondly we have much more modern refineries than the US which hasnt built a new refinery in 30 years. Our refineries can process Sour Crude (high sulfur crude) which is 10-15$ cheaper per barrel than the sweet crude price the government keeps talking about. Thirdly our environment standards are much lower than the US so our refiners can refine the oil much more cheaply. Fifthly we have cheap labor and thus our refiners run much cheaper. In fact India is one of the largest exporters of refined oil products - petrol and diesel in the region. Also with prices cheaper than us the US government uses their gas taxes to provide 6 lane elevated super highways with no toll. Just what do we get for our gas taxes? Any decent road is tolled (Roads within cities are paid through municipal taxes so are a separate issue). So just why is our gas price so high? Lets look at taxes. The Us imposes a federal 15 cent tax for building highways and various states impose a state tax which averages to 21 cent a gallon. So without taxes a US gallon is 3.74 dollars a gallon working out to 42 rupees a liter and the taxes are 2 rupees a liter. Now lets look at how much tax our Indian government imposes The central government imposes 14 rupees of Excise. The State Government impose 13 rupees of sales tax. This is before the highway building cess whish is just 60 paise a liter. So this means the Oil companies get around 23 rupees out of 50 rupees so they have a loss of around 10 rupees per liter (not 19 rupees as Indian petrol's production costs are roughly 33 rupees a liter not 42 for the reasons given above) So the OMCs are making a 10 rupee loss but the OMCs are owned by the central government so they take 14 rupees excise and pay 10 rupees of that to the Oil marketing companies as subsidy and are still left with 4 rupees profit. But the real culprits here are the state governments who do not give us anything in return for the 13 rupees they collect as excise. Thus all this moaning and groaning from the OMCs about underrecoveries is just bull. And the moaning and groaning from the state governments is even worse its hypocritic bull.