These are essays I wrote quite a long time ago, during my schooling / college days.
Tracing the Evolution of Superstition
It was my tenth grade board exams and I could not complete the social studies paper on time. No, it was not the lack of time but rather the fact that I did not know the time. I never used to wear a watch to an exam because whenever I wore a watch, I would perform poorly in the exam. This is the most common type of superstition and is called the “Principle of Random Reinforcement”. It is an act of relating a random action to the consequence of an event. For example, Sachin Tendulkar always wears his left pad first and then his right pad. He relates the act of wearing his pads in the correct order to winning the match.
Most often we think of superstition as religious beliefs. The biggest question that scientists are trying to answer is that are these beliefs a biological or sociological phenomenon. There is no concrete answer to this yet. If we assume that religious beliefs are biological and that these beliefs have played a major role in development of human race then according to Darwin’s theory of “Natural Selection”, there should be no atheists alive. But looking at a broader perspective, all these beliefs are based on one single characteristic of human beings called the “blind faith”.
Scientists claim that blind faith has played a major role in the development of human race. An experiment was conducted to find out the differences in the way humans and Chimps learn. The result s showed that the aspect of blind faith helped human children learn better than Chimpanzee’s even though Chimps are good at logical thinking. Also the concept of placebo effect is entirely based on blind faith. Doctors in America have been successfully using the placebo effect to cure patients.
However, there is always a negative attitude towards superstition. There are primarily five reasons attributed to this. First, it might affect the decision making abilities of a person. Second, it might interfere with the daily life of a person. For example according to Hindu mythology, there is a particular period during each day which is considered inauspicious, this period is called Raghukalam. People who believe in this tend not to leave their homes during this period, which could affect how they schedule their every day activities. Third, the origin for most of the superstition is lost. For example, spilling of salt is considered as inauspicious. This is because in medieval Europe, salt was an extremely expensive commodity and hence the belief was created. However, salt being inexpensive nowadays, this belief is not of much relevance. Fourth, sometimes we are forced to follow certain superstitious beliefs by our parents and elders. This creates a negative impact towards superstition. Finally, an extreme case of superstition leads to a condition called “Superstitious Obsessive Compulsive Disorder” or in short “Superstitious OCD”. For example, most of us consider number 13 to be unlucky, but does it mean that we don’t read the chapter 13 of a book, or does it mean that we cancel a movie plan because there were 13 in the group. We normally don’t do any of these, but people who suffer from superstitious OCD exhibit this behavior.
Having discussed both the pros and cons of superstition, what can we conclude about it? What stand can we take on this? According to me, superstition is like the dessert in a meal. Dessert is something that makes one feel good, but one cannot have the entire dessert as the meal. The main course is required for health and nutrition. Similarly, superstition is something that makes us feel good in our tasks. It is ultimately the hard work and dedication that helps us achieve success.
Does Religion Contradict Feminism?
The UNDP’s (United Nations Development Program) report of 2006 showed that the top ten nations with the highest levels of gender equality are all strongly organic atheistic nations (as opposed to ‘coerced atheism’ like in communist countries), while the bottom ten are all highly religious countries with insignificant number of atheists.
Ordinance of women is prohibited in Christianity and Judaism. According to Islam, women are not allowed to enter through the front door of a mosque. Hindu religion allowed the practice of widow burning or Sati for centuries. Is religion the biggest obstacle to gender equality?
The purpose of religion is to make people disciplined and obedient. It makes women submissive and subservient due to the rules that are imposed. This leads to a psychological phenomenon called the Stockholm syndrome wherein oppressed women tend to express adulation and develop positive feelings towards dominating men. This is the reason why most women choose not to protest against the cruelty done to them.
Religion also leads to male stereotypes who believe that women are inferior. This is again a natural human tendency. Humans generally jump to conclusions without much investigation. So, if religion portrays the role of women as being modest and submissive, then men are more likely to perceive it in a way that is favorable to them. Thus religion in a way is a major cause for male stereotypes.
Religion is very contradictory and provides a lot of opportunity for discrimination but it doesn’t mean one should stay atheist. Religion is shaped by humans or rather men and just because humans have misinterpreted religion, it doesn’t mean one should stop believing in a higher power. However, neither religion nor men can be blamed for this. Since it is evident that any act performed by an individual will never be selfless, and men being the predominant gender to have shaped religion, they have used religion as a means to establish their dominance.
This unfortunately, has resulted in the true essence of religion to fade away. For example, Islam was one of the first religions which recognized the independent existence of women. The Holy Quran does not address only men, it addresses both the genders. Therefore, the best solution to achieve gender equality is to encourage women to aim for the highest decision making positions in both, government and corporate sectors.
Assessment on the nature of Laptop / PC interface
Introduction:
The main purpose of an interface to the laptop/PC is to store, retrieve and process information. The preferred choice of the interface was obviously a keyboard, due to the popularity of the typewriter. But with the introduction of Graphical User Interface (GUI) on the PC, the keyboard could no longer interface efficiently with the PC. Imagine navigating through the GUI using a set of keys or worse, trying to remember keys for each item on the GUI. Hence with invention of the ‘mouse’ enabled the use of PCs with ease and in great detail. It also led to the introduction of home PC, which meant that the computers were no longer a device restricted to only the trained professionals. But there was still one factor that deprived the use of computers to a large community. This was the amount of money that one had to invest to own a computer. Hence in a way the computer was still restricted to trained professionals and this meant that there was very less need for research and innovation in the field of human computer interface.
But in the recent past, there has been a great interest in developing better interfaces to the laptop / PC. This is primarily due to the following two reasons,
1. The cost of the computer has reduced drastically making it available to the masses.
2. Computers are being used in a wide variety of applications mainly due to a combination of better performance and low cost.
Identifying the problems:
We shall see how the reasons stated above have lead to a growing need for research in this area. For our discussion we will consider the problems of interfaces to the laptop and ways to improve on it rather than taking an intermediate stand between the laptop and the PC. This is because the current trend clearly shows that the laptops will eventually replace the PCs. In addition there are physical constraints like size, weight etc when designing interfaces to laptop, which makes the task all the more challenging and important. Until recently a typical laptop user could be assumed to be a trained computer professional. This was the reason why the basic interface design of a laptop has not changed over the past decade. But with laptops becoming more and more affordable, this assumption no longer holds and this brings us to identifying the first major problem in the existing interface to laptop, which is the issue of diversity. The problem is how to design an interface that is intuitive across the diverse population. We will look at finding ways to address this issue later in this article.
The other problem is that the interface has not been able to live up to the level of sophistication available in the software applications that are run on the laptops. Most often it is the limitation in the interface (keyboard / mouse) that restricts the scope of the application. This problem can be seen in several applications, for example in computer games the innovation is greatly restricted due to the limitation in the interface unlike console games where recent advancements in the interface have totally redefined our perception of gaming. Another example to highlight this problem could be that of a 3-D map explorer, which as we all know has widespread application in almost all fields. Until recently the major limitation in an application like the 3-D map explorer was the processing power of the computer, but with more powerful systems hitting the market, the onus is now on the interface to fill the void. We will look at finding ways to address this issue later in this article.
Ways to improve and solve the problem:
Having listed the main problems in interface to laptops, we need to now find ways to improve it. To do this we will first have to define what an interface actually means. Basically it is a means to communicate between one object and another object. Well, then what is the interface that human beings use to communicate among themselves and why can’t we just adapt that as an interface to a laptop? There are several ways in which we communicate with each other, but the following two are the preferred modes of interface that we use to communicate among us,
Speech
Gesture
No matter how diverse we are, these are the two things that are common to all of us. Of course there are 100s of languages we speak and they not necessarily have anything in common, but the idea is our most preferred way of interfacing is speech. But this is something that may not be a feasible solution as an interface to a laptop, at least for next few decades. The reason being the lack of advancements in speech recognition techniques. Even if we do see any advancements, the sheer diversity of languages will make it all the more complex to implement. The other option is the use of gestures, now this has a great potential of a feasible and intuitive interface to the laptop. This is because the gestures are something very natural and common to all human beings. Hence I personally feel that this is going to play major role in improving the interface to laptops. Recently, the touch sensitive interfaces have gained popularity and there are plenty of devices already in the market which provide this functionality. It is only a matter of time for these touch sensitive interfaces to be soon available on laptops at affordable prices.
Conclusion:
We started our discussion with a brief history on the need and evolution of interfaces to PCs. We listed out reasons to why there had been little research in the area of HCI in the past and what lead to the increased interest recently. We then identified the major problems in the interface to laptops which are, the issue of addressing diversity and the issue of supporting innovative applications. We finally came up with ways to improve the interface by taking the analogy of a simple communication interface between human beings. These could primarily be speech, gesture and touch sensitive interfaces. We also saw why speech may not be a feasible choice as an interface to laptops for at least a few decades to come. Whereas advancements in the areas of object recognition and touch sensitive devices have been considerable and can be used to greatly improve the interface to laptops and PCs.
References:
http://www.usask.ca/education/coursework/skaalid/theory/interface.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii