August 16, 2008
Postal Address Locator (PAL) - an innovation by India Post

Those who think Postal Services are not meant for this generation, rethink!!!. India post has proposed to replace the age old Postal Index (PIN) code with 8 digit Postal Address Locator (PAL) code. In the past we have seen such revolutions in Telecom industry, when the number of digits in our telephone number increased from five to six and then to eight. Now we will soon see our pin codes also changing this way, but your new code is not going to be your old code prefixed with the state/city code.

As per this proposal, the new PAL code will have 8 digits. First two digits denote the state, next two digits denote either the metro or the district. For a metro locality, the fifth digit denotes its zone and the last three digits denote the locality. For a non-metro locality, the 5th digit denotes a town in the district and the last 3 digits denote the village.

For metro localities


22015248



{State}{Metro City}{Metro Zone}{Locality}



For non-metro localities


22106178



{State}{District}{Town}{village}



In third and fourth digits, the range 01 to 09 is used to denote a metro in the state and values 10 to 99 are used for districts. So, this code can accommodate 9 metros and 90 districts in a state, which is good enough even for the largest state U.P, which has 70 districts. It’s imminent that the code for state capital will be 01. Metro, in this context, doesn’t mean metropolitan cities but municipal cities. So second tier cities like Coimbatore, Pune, Surat, Mysore will be identified from each state and metro codes are assigned for them. There can be 9 such cities from a state.

If the fifth digit is between one and five, it denotes a zone in metro and other values denote a town in the district. As this system accommodates just 5 towns in a district, it’s not clear on what basis such towns are identified from districts.

At maximum, the system supports 9999 villages in a district or same number of localities in a metro. So the smallest entity identified by this code will be a village or a metro locality, regardless of whether it has a post office or not. A question arises here is that a small district in the state of Pondichery and the Mumbai city, which has a population of 2 crore, will get the same number of slots for their localities according to this design. I think, for postal department geography is more important than the demography. So Mumbai with an area comparable with that of a district will get the same number of slots for its localities. Rather I feel, by allotting single digit metro code value (01 to 09) in the third and fourth positions, they are wasting a precious digit in the PAL code. We could increase the number of locality slots for a metro by 10 fold, if just the third digit is used for the metro code and the last 5 digits are used for the localities. India post encourages citizens to send their views on the new PAL system. Note the email address - deputydgpoi at gmail.com. I’ve just sent the above suggestion to this email.

The proposal document claims that the first half of the code will be used to segregate the outgoing mails and second half will be used in delivering the incoming mails.

Another interesting aspect I noted from this document is about the increasing passion in Government organizations like India Post and BSNL. See this excerpt from a slide for popularizing the PAL system,

Launch a bold and innovative publicity campaign for 2 months before introduction that should catch the imagination of the nation like wild fire - Something like KBC or IPL


Would you have imagined this passion in a Govt. organization? Though they are far behind the private organizations in terms of liberal decision making, there are already promising signs of improvement. One should note that unlike growth in the private sector, the growth in Government sector triggers growth of the Nation by multifold.

5:50pm  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZkjYJypz49c
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November 14, 2007
Reasoning for why bodies fall at same rate

We all are aware that bodies fall at same rate irrespective of their weights. Well, let’s see how our geniuses have arrived at this in the days where there was no definition for velocity or acceleration. While reading Stephen Hawking’s A Briefer History of Time, I stumbled upon the explanation given for bodies falling at same rate. This snippet taken from Google Book Search shows,

Bodies fall at same rate

(continuing…) forces cancel out and a body will always fall at the same rate irrespective of its weight.

How a layman would understand this? There comes the giant Galileo, who gave a simpler explanation long back in 16th Century. Here is the excerpt taken from the book “On Giants’ shoulders”. Here is the excerpt,
He (Galileo) imagined a light and a heavy body tied together and asked the question ‘Does the presence of the light body help or hinder the fall of the heavy body?’. Now if, as Aristotle had maintained and, as intuition may tell us, light body would impede the fall of the heavy body, because it would lag behind and restrain it. But Galileo reasoned that if we consider the entire assemblage of heavy plus light body together, well, that is heavier than the heavy body on its own, so the assemblage should fall faster, and so we arrive at the contradiction that the presence of the light body should both speed up and slow down the fall of the heavy body. That is obviously nonsense, and so the only way we can reconcile it is to suppose that both heavy and the light body fall at the same speed.

What a wonderful example of Galileo’s reasoning? The former explanation using Newton’s laws can be commonly found in our text books. But Galileo’s reasoning makes more sense and our education system doesn’t induce such a reasoning power into us.

This video below shows the Hammer-Feather drop experiment performed by the astronaut David Scott on moon during Apollo 15 mission. Since there was no atmosphere, a feather and a hammer fell at the same rate and the entire world witnessed this historic proof for Galileo’s findings.

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August 10, 2007
Crystal Xcelsius

I got an opportunity to learn about a tool called Xcelsius. It’s been a wonderful experience so far. This tool lets you create handy dashboards in less time. The tool is very useful for those who work in Data Ware Housing and would like to create a presentation out of their data. Designing a visualization is very simple and requires no analytical skills. It generates a interactive Flash movie of the presentation which can be easily shared by mail.

One should possess good knowledge on spreadsheets and cell formulae before using this tool. If you want to display dynamic data, there is XML and Web services for you.

Flash knowledge is not required as the tool generates the flash movie and Actionscript based on our design using the underlying data model (spreadsheet). Excel is used only in the design time for defining the data model.

For a demonstration, I created a visualization which compares popularity of the two or more terms. The logic is implemented in a ASP.Net web service, which makes use of the Google SOAP Search API to find the number of result pages for a search query.

The visualization invokes the web service and gets back the XML data containing number of result pages for each of the inputted terms.

Number of result pages is not a perfect measure for popularity. But by phrasing a search query for each of those terms, we can get an approximate picture of their popularity.

10:30am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/ZkjYJypz3uT
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