Hello Darkness, smile old friend....
I have come to talk to you again...

Simon & Garfunkel..

Because most aircraft accidents happen during takeoffs and landings—the most hectic and coordination-intensive parts of any flight—the industry has imposed a rule called the “sterile cockpit”. Anytime the aircraft is below 10,000 feet—whether on the way up or the way down—no conversation is permitted, except what’s directly relevant for flying. At 11,000 feet, you can talk about football, your kids, or the loathsome passengers. But not at 9,500 feet.

In an organization, the IT group jointly agreed on a sterile cockpit for their software project. The group had embraced a substantial goal—to reduce new product development time from three years to nine months. In previous projects with tight deadlines, the work environment had become increasingly stressful, and as workers got behind schedule, they’d tend to start interrupting their colleagues for quick help. Managers would wander by regularly to be “statused” on the project. As a result, people were interrupted more and more, and work weeks expanded to 60 and 70 hours as people started showing up on the weekend, hoping to get some work done when they could focus.

The IT group decided to try an experiment—they established “quiet hours” on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday mornings before noon. The goal was to give coders a sterile cockpit, allowing them to tackle more complex bits of coding without being derailed by periodic interruptions. Even the socially insensitive responded well to the change in the Path. One engineer, previously among the worst interrupters, said, “I always used to worry about my own quiet time and how to get more of it, but this experiment made me think about how I’m impacting others.”

In the end, the group managed to meet its stringent nine-month development goal. And the division VP attributed the success to the sterile cockpit quiet hours: “I do not think we could’ve made the deadline without it,” he said. “This is a new benchmark.”

In these disparate environments—cockpits and hospitals and IT workgroups—the right behaviors did not evolve naturally. Nurses weren’t “naturally” given enough space to work without distraction, and programmers weren’t “naturally” left alone to focus on coding. Instead, leaders had to reshape the environment consciously. With some simple tweaks to the environment, suddenly the right behaviors emerged. It wasn’t the people who changed, it was the situation. What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.

        

Aircel has launched an initiative called www.saveourtigers.com

Its really laudable. As a group, I have always seen them innovate and go that extra step.
I hope that something good comes out of this initiative.

On a side note, I have always wondered how do you mobilize masses who have daily chores
to do and put bread on the table to be senstitive and participate in largr causes.

Only 1411 left..

        

Edge Question:”How Has The Internet Changed The Way You Think?” Answers from some of the world’s best.

Start-ups need to Focus: by Ed Sim. “It is always hard for a startup to enter a market with an end-to-end product positioning as most customers expect large companies to cover this territory.  What most customers expect from startups is innovation and breakthrough offerings, not end-to-end solutions. “

Ambedkar’a Desiderata:by Ramachandra Guha in Outlook, on India’s 60 years as a Republic. His last para is telling: “The times we live in, and the expectations engendered by them, call for leadership that is rather better than mediocre. The men and women who now rule India—whether from the centre or in the states—seem concerned, above all, with survival: the survival in his present post of an individual politician; the survival at the apex of the organisation of a particular family; the survival in government of a particular party. To plausibly and successfully redeem the ideals of the republic, however, this shall not be enough.”

India’s Local Newspapers: from India Knowledge@Wharton. “At a time when newspapers are folding around the world, India’s media scene is admirably buoyant. Why? Many experts give credit to the country’s burgeoning rural, local-language newspaper business…But these publications face their own growth challenges, including India’s relatively low literacy rate, poor infrastructure and the increasing penetration of television in rural areas.”

        

Happy New Year!!!

        

When I was studying, Dijkstra had this famous anecdote that "Goto" statements are considered harmful and hence should be conisdered illegal! (http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD02xx/EWD215.html)

I put forwrard a similar case for ToString(). Generations of programmers have been brought up to do ToString() without checking null and causes all kinds of harmful side effects long after the program is written.

C# has given us a wonderful keyword called "as" which essentially encapsulates the following

if(null != <your variable>
{
   <another variable> = <your variable>.ToString()
}

So next time you are writing ToString() or toString() or another variant ... consider it carefully and use the above construct instead.
It is also a good practice as part of Defensive Programming.

        

Scenario
Ram is an electrician operating in the Shivadaspur area in the Varanasi town. His expertise lies in fixing house-hold electrical problems of all kinds, except air coolers and air-conditioners. He cannot afford to have a shop of his own and his business depends on customers who know him by word-of-mouth. Recently, Ram bought a mobile phone, and started advertising his services in the Shivadaspur Yellow Pages. Since then, the business has started picking up. However, many a times, while on a home call on duty, he is unable to accept calls, and this often results in losing new customers and upsetting old ones. One day, he finds out about a Create-your-virtual-shop service offered by his Telecom operator, and decides to sign up. He calls up the advertised phone number and creates his virtual shop as a VoiceSite in a matter of minutes by talking to this voice driven system. He also specifies reference information about previous customers and links to their phone numbers. Now the customers trying to reach Ram land up at this virtual shop and schedule an appointment with him while he is serving other customers. In addition, he adds links to the virtual shops of his friends who can take up the job in the event that he is unavailable at the time specified by the customer. Seeing Ram’s increasing customer base, the electrical shop
owner in his area requests Ram to include a link to the electrical shop’s tele-store (another virtual shop), where customers can place their orders which will be home delivered by the store. Customers can pay through their bank account or through one of the credit cards that have a tie up with store’s telecom provider. The payment happens safely through a voice driven interaction with the bank’s VoiceSite during the phone call, much in the same way as online transactions happen on the Web. This adds another customer facing channel for the electrical shop and adds to the services offered by Ram. Ram gets a percentage of the profits for customers reaching through his virtual shop and thus both Ram and the local store thrive with the use of Virtual Shop
service.

Scenario courtesy: Arun Kumar

        

        

One from Joel's archives...

        

The phrase “voice internet’s” second word “internet” is as important as the first word. Till now I have been extolling the virtues of “voice” but what really happened in the textual and multi-media internet is the ability to link multiple applications via hyper-linking. Even more important was the ability to pass “context” and “parameters” to other applications. For e.g. you could be on Amazon site and you could be transferred to a payment site without losing context and data being pre-filled. Similarly with the advent of web-services you can integrate multiple applications programmatically with ease.

Now contrast this with the current scenario in the voice applications world. All “voice UI” aka IVR applications are standalone applications essentially. They interact with a backend database or CRM or payment gateway systems but not at the voice level, rather at an application level.

Why is this important you ask? 

Consider an application in the travel domain.
You call up a number say – 1-800-TRAVEL and want to find the cheapest fares across a number of travel sites and airlines. BUT, you do not want to book these tickets on this number, instead you want to book directly at the site which offers the cheapest flight. So, you call up this number and specify your details
Starting city: Delhi
Destination city: Mumbai
Start date: Sep 28, 2009
Return date: Oct 4, 2009

The application searches for then lowest fares and finds it on Jet Airways. However, now you need to be transferred to the Jet Airways voice app, and there is no way for Jet Airway voice app to know that you are coming with the context of Delhi-Mumbai return flight. You have really no choice but to enter the details again. Ugly Ugly Ugly.

I am open to suggestions on this and also looking for a solution. If someone knows anything please let me know, as I am designing my own solution to fulfill the promise of the voice internet.

 

        

There is another set of standards called vXML (Voice XML) and ccXML (call control XML) that have also come on scene recently. Whilst these standards are useful in what they do, they are not really the answer to all the problems that face us. For example, when a vXML application is interacting with a speech recognizer, there doesn’t seem to be a clean way of specifying which grammar to use, especially when the grammar is big and you probably need just a “lever” to tell it to load a particular grammar, and not send the “entire” grammar over the wire. 

 

The solution that I saw in a couple of implementations is that they passed out of band data or used some other handshake protocol to do this. Obviously this is less than a desirable situation to be in. If one has to leverage the full power of voice, then one has to do something more than just build standalone voice applications that have difficulty interacting with internal and external applications.