When an acquaintance called to enquire about the timings of Friday’s annular eclipse of the sun, the longest anyone will witness from Earth this millennium, I was reminded of the another spectacular sky show that took place last year.

While the high point of Friday’s event was a fiery ‘golden bangle’ seen from many parts of the world including the southern tip of India, the solar eclipse of July 22 was all about totality – the complete obscuration of the sun with its ‘corona’ dramatically glowing in a near dark sky.

The moments seem frozen in time.

We were at the Assi Ghat in Benaras.

A sadhu, bathing in the Ganga among thousands of other devout, stood transfixed.

In fact, if a spiritual experience expands human consciousness, helps a person see things in a new light and connects him to a larger reality, then it can be deeply spiritual to watch a celestial spectacle such as an eclipse.

It was a wonderful piece of engineering: a magnetic tape placed upon a spindle that could store, by the time I became old enough to use one, 1.44MB data.

A hard disk (HD) in computers is the slowest part and even as processors with their many cores gain more and more speed, the computing experience is being held back by storage devices.

Mainstream HDs spin at a pitiful 7200 rhythms per minute (those in laptops fare even worse at 5400) and writing or reading heavy DVDs or CDs is painfully slow.

The result is slow boot time, slow application launch, long load time during gaming, an occasional jerk or two as you access loads of data at the same time or multi-task heavily.

And this on a fairly fast computer; just because storage technology has fallen behind other advances in the field.Till a few years ago, HDs were considered a necessary evil.

Recently, I met Eli Harari, CEO and founder of Sandisk.

The Election Commission’s reported decision to not count any of the paper receipts produced by the voter-verifiable paper audit trail (VVPAT) machines attached to EVMs in the upcoming Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh assembly elections may not pass muster.

Earlier the EC had discussed the possibility of a 5% ceiling on counting VVPAT trails and mandatorily counting paper trails from not less than 5 and not more than 14 polling stations in each constituency.

It silenced those like the Aam Aadmi Party which alleged that EVM tampering had sabotaged its chances in the Punjab assembly elections.

The decision to postpone tallying the paper trail count to EVM count was purportedly necessitated by the need to ensure that the roll-out of 100% VVPAT is a success.

Additionally, there is a lack of clarity on the delays in the counting and result declaration process because of VVPAT counting.

However, candidates who wish to dispute the election outcome can still demand a count of VVPAT machine.However, both grounds are tenuous.

Agriculture should be the focus of this year’s Budget, according to a Twitter poll conducted by the ministry of finance last week that saw some 66% of more than 21,400 respondents seeking a more agriculture-focused Budget.

Not the services and manufacturing industries.

Demonetisation compelled farmers to move towards cashless payments and digitalisation.

Now they need greater ‘ease of doing business’ to harness that momentum.

The average farm in the country is 1.15 hectares in size and will shrink further by 2020-21.

According to the 2013 Situation Assessment Survey of Farmers/Agricultural Households, you can’t earn a living from a farm smaller than one hectare.

Typical of any Apple product, iPad is a sleek, shiny gadget with slick interface and, for a change, has been priced somewhat decently.

But it’s not the revolutionary product which we came to expect ever since we heard that Steve Jobs was personally supervising development of “mythical tablet” and was giving it everything he could.Now, don’t get me wrong.

“All of us use laptops and smartphones… is there room for something in the middle.

Better than the laptop, better than the smartphone,” said Jobs on Wednesday as he held an iPad in his hand.

Take the iPhone, stretch it from the sides, add a few snippets from iPod touch, perfect the Kindle idea, throw in a slimmed down iWorks, and there, you have it!

Yet, it lacks support for flash, which is omnipresent on the web and is critical to multimedia content.

I would argue that my warped headline is just about as explanatory as all the reportage and even the WHO study itself.

My understanding of the findings is that while there is no clinching evidence to show a direct link, there is enough to keep scientists interested in conducting more research.

A quick look at headlines from across the world though, is proof that everybody has their own interpretation.

Obviously the mobile companies are thrilled, while (I assume that) folks who make radiation shields will be crying foul!

Granted that scientific research, in particular statistical studies can often be tricky, but this topic was always going to be explosive.

For now though, ignore the nitty-gritties of the number crunching and causation v correlation debate.

Should the management of listed companies unduly worry about financial investors who seek to join the board?

Certainly not, except in the case of rogues who seek to misuse inside information.

They can hold the company to account and demand better performance.

The Companies Act provides the right to any person other than retiring directors to stand for director.

Active shareholder democracy would bring in greater transparency and checks and balances in the system, boosting corporate governance.

Shareholder activism is needed in the Indian context.Banks are now saddled with bad loans, which have surged as many promoters paid off the political system, got loans sanctioned for inflated costs and harvested the excess amounts for themselves.

If the last epoch in retail banking was defined by a boom-to-bust expansion of consumer credit, the current one will be defined by digital.

This will include rapid innovation in payments and the broader transformation in systems enabled by digital technologies.

Banks have 3-5 years at most to become digitally proficient.

If they fail, they risk entering a spiral of decline similar to laggards in other industries.Revenues and profits will migrate at scale toward banks that successfully use digital technologies to automate processes, create new products, improve regulatory compliance, transform the experiences of their customers and disrupt key components of the value chain.Institutions that resist digital innovation will be punished by customers, financial markets and, sometimes, regulators.

Indeed, digital laggards could see up to 35% of net profit eroded, while winners may realise a profit upside of 40% or more.Globally, more innovative incumbent banks and financial institutions are moving rapidly towards digital.… Most have invested in transaction migration and upgraded web and mobile technologies and created innovation and testing centres.In addition, banks increasingly realise that to succeed with digital, they must adopt the habits and culture of digitally native companies: say, opening up the banks’ application programming interfaces, pursuing agile development or hosting hackathons to foster intensive digital collaboration.

From “Strategic Choices for Banks in the Digital Age”.

TechCrunch.com had a post up sometime last night claiming that India’s largest software company Tata Consultancy Services’ website, www.tcs.com had been ‘hacked’.

this is a classic DNS hack and only certain name servers seem to be affected.

The WHOIS page for TCS lists the following nameservers:A domain name server is basically a centralized online directory/database which keeps a list of IP addresses corresponding to the domain names that we type into our browser.

When twitter.com recently fell victim to such an attack, the perpetrators could have got access to twitter usernames and passwords if they’d put up a fake login page so that users would think they were entering the information into twitter.com as usual.

Luckily it was just a political statement by Iranian hackers.In this case it seems likely that one (or both) of TCS’ website registrar ie.

Network Solution International’s name servers has been compromised though we’re still awaiting an update from TCS on whether any of theirs were tampered with too.

Ultra-expensive computer hardware, a few kilos of dry ice, a massive dewar full of liquid nitrogen (LN2) and some chutzpah to put all this stuff at stake to chase computing records – that is the idea of weekend fun for hardcore computer hardware enthusiasts.

And, last week, I was lucky to be part of this exotic meet as a few of India’s most well-known hardware enthusiasts came together in a small room in south Delhi, aiming to push the latest and greatest computer hardware to its limit in a bid to break onto the world stage of overclocking.Overclocking, or in simpler words, running a computer at a speed higher than what has been specified, gained momentum in 90s when geeks tried to milk every bit of extra performance from expensive computer parts.

After 2000, the price of computer hardware started to creep downwards even as the performance increased by leaps and bounds.

This largely obviated the need for overclocking to save money.

But a large community of hardware enthusiast refused to give up overclocking.

Instead, overclocking, which was earlier a necessity, evolved into a hobby.

In July, the goods and services tax (GST) was rolled out to a mixed reception.

Its objective is to prevent cascading of taxes and avoid built-in taxes — for example, excise duty at the factory gate, duty on equipment used by telecom companies, etc — thereby lowering retail prices and increasing tax revenue by more voluntary compliance.If it proves effective, there is an anticipated increase in GDP by 2%.

But the implementation of GST has not gone down well with everyone as the initial impact on the market has been an increase in the prices of goods and services.

It is also because taxes have become more visible, as compared to earlier when they were hidden and built into the price itself.What was visible earlier was a value-added tax (VAT) imposed by states at the retail level or the service tax imposed by the Centre.

The new 5%, 12%, 18% and 28% tax based on categories divided into essentials, necessities and luxuries has also left the public confused.But if anyone has been particularly hurt by GST, the differently-abled are facing a double blow.

With 5% GST being imposed on disability equipment, the message sent out is not one of inclusion.

A fortnight ago, in an email advisory , the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) -the central switch and umbrella organisation for retail payments -reiterated a simple message to all large banks.

It said that everyday a bank must match transactions on its UPI apps with data it receives from NPCI.

Reconciling outflow of money with inflow is a practice that every banker learns during the first week in the job.

The communiqué, however, was a grim reminder of the price a bank may have to pay if it ignores this ancient tradition of the trade; and, it follows the bitter experience of a government-owned bank in Maharashtra which recently discovered that Rs 25 crore was quietly pilfered from multiple accounts over a few months by a gang of 50.Just armed with smartphones and a few GBs of data, the members of this syndicate were spread over smaller towns like Aurangabad, Latur, and Nashik to execute their plan.

Fraudsters don’t have to necessarily hack into a bank’s system and IT network to rob it; they can still manage a neat job to pull out money with the age-old technique of spotting a chink.Contrary to popular belief and some media reports, the fraud in the Maharashtra bank wasn’t a cyber crime: the bank’s system was not hacked and no virus found its way to divert funds from one account to another or make its ATMs spew out cash.

What took place was amazingly simple.Think how the bank’s app works.It’s based on United Payment Interface (UPI), a technology that helps to move money from one bank account to another with a few clicks on a mobile phone.When money is transferred from one account to another -say when a shopper keys in the 4-digit PIN to ‘push’ money from her account to a grocer’s account -certain IT systems ‘talk’ with each other to complete the transaction.

I mentioned in the recent post about the TCS website hack that it isn’t a great advertisement for a large tech company to put up a third party, (Honeybee Technology Inc. in this case) as its administrative contact on the WHOIS page.

Here is the screenshot of that page on the day of the hacking: Well, it seems that the ‘Administrative Contact’.

Honeybee Technology Inc was a listed Canadian company until trading in its shares was suspended because it was found to be part of a network of companies involved in one of Canada’s largest financial frauds.

In fact one of the main accused in the ‘Mount Real’ scam, Lino Matteo is still listed as the Administrative Contact for the Honeybee Technology Inc website (today’s WHOIS screenshot here) although the site itself seems to be ‘Under Construction.’ Net-net it’s an avoidable embarrassment, to continue being associated with these guys.

Btw, I’m obviously not accusing TCS of any wrongdoing here – a massive company works with tons of vendors and can’t be accountable for all of them.

I mean, what about all the companies who outsourced work to Satyam, (including the Times of India Group)?

Then early this month, the news of Dubai-Pune Air India Express flight which plunged dangerously over the Arabian sea broke out and the industry veterans did a spirited recall of ghost flights of the early ’70s.

But then, don’t we all know, that in the aviation industry, anything goes.Now, there have been many incidents/accidents in the past involving diving aircraft — some like AI Express B737 did dramatic descents, while in other cases the descent rate was so gradual that it went unnoticed.

None, however, kept an entire nation riveted like the events that followed the Eastern Airlines December 29, 1972, crash of flight 401.

The aircraft’s autopilot disengaged during a go-around and the jet began a slow descent only to eventually plough into the swamp and crash.

The flight engineer Donald Repo was in the avionics bay to check on a landing gear problem.

The aircrash investigation report said the crew got distracted with the undercarriage problem and failed to monitor flight instruments.It was the first jet air crash in the US history and the sheer magnitude of casualties stunned the nation and its airline industry.

It is one of the 30 major, 135 medium and nearly 3,000 dams planned for full utilisation of the river’s waters, benefiting Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Rajasthan.

The mood was different when the Amazon was tamed, the Aswan was built across the Nile and Bhakra Nangal came up.

The environmental costs of dams were less appreciated and the human cost seen as well worth bearing, for the larger common good.The height of the Sardar Sarovar dam causes heartburn in Madhya Pradesh, where much of the incremental submergence takes place.

Submergence displaces people, mostly poor, sinks cropped land and kills off wild fauna and flora.

Yet, India must build large dams, to harness the monsoons’ bounty that drains away.

The sum total of benefits across space and time from such dams would far outweigh the costs.

I look at how investor learning affects firms’ voluntary disclosure decisions.

What are the forces that shape management earnings forecast decisions?Empirically, there is a very interesting phenomenon, which is that earnings forecast decisions tend to be “sticky” over time.

The mechanism is investor learning about unknown firm profitability.We know that investors don’t know everything, so it is a reasonable assumption that investors don’t know firm profitability.

Just by taking this simple premise, I show that investor learning leads to sticky disclosure incentives.Say that you invest in Apple; you think that Apple is a pretty good firm.

Just observing that Apple’s performance drops a little bit at a certain time doesn’t mean that Apple is a bad firm for you.

In other words, investors’ beliefs are sticky over time.