Scribe

Today I acted as a scribe for one of the blind students here at Stanford for his EE101 final exam. Long day! Professors give them 8 hours for the usual 3 hours final. Feeling kinda suffocated after sitting in that one room for 8 continuous hours with nothing but packed cold sandwich to eat. On one hand, I have a feeling that all my sins have been wiped away after this noble deed, on the other hand I constantly get reminded that I was clearly doing this for money, that too rate as high as 20 INR/ minute.

Okay, so here is how it works. Professor gets two copies of the question paper, one in braille (20-30 pages of huge A3 sheets) for the student and one in normal text for the scribe. Scribe does mainly two things: First, read out the question for the student if he/she asks for it. This is important because sometimes people who convert text to braille screw up, especially with typical EE things like circuits, graphs or equations. And second, write down answers in the answer booklet as the student dictates them periodically.

Student had a dog (trained one for safety, most disabled students on campus carry one), a braille typewriter (where in he can type and only he can understand), braille notepad (where in he can draw stuff like diagrams, which he can himself sense by hand and can also show it to me for copying in the answer booklet), a voice-enabled-calculator and of course, more food than me. Typically, student reads the question, clarifies if he/she finds anything weird, takes his time to solve on the braille typewriter and then dictates the solution once he/she's done. Scribe is essentially sitting idle (or doing own work) most of the time and ideally should not crib about long hours.

I was told repeatedly not to help the kid with any EE knowledge or even ask questions like "Are you sure about this?" (:P) even if the mistake is painstakingly obvious. Only reason EE person is needed is to understand the terms without any hassles. For example, if the person says R1 parallel R2, scribe should automatically be able to write R1 || R2. Having said that, I must add most of the questions weren't trivial for me either (Yes, some random 3-stage amplifiers with 1 stage being common gate, 1 stage being common drain and so on) :D Rather, it was amazing to see how a blind person can show so much interest in the topic and take efforts to learn the subject on a par with regular students. After all, we crib so much! So, next time you crib about exams or work or this world being not nice to you (:P), think twice!

RSA Expo

I went to meet my adviser on Wednesday morning and he says how about you go to San Francisco tomorrow and visit RSA Expo. RSA Expo was essentially an exhibition that was being held in San Francisco this week as a part of RSA conference. As you might have guessed, saying no wasn't really an option :D

There were about 200 computer and network security firms in the expo with their exhibits. Most people were nicely dressed in business casuals (as against my usual perception about tech firms :P). As you can see, atmo was 'rich' (again, unlike the usual perception about tech firms I have from India :D) with loads of freebies and i-pad raffles!

Here is an unsorted list of interesting things/people that I came across:

- Smart Cartridge Project

Most people buy a good quality printer from a recognized brand. However, when it comes to replacing cartridges, they tend to go for 'pirated' low quality ones. As a result, printer companies are losing money and they also 'claim' that it reduces printer life. Smart Cartridge Project is about making cartridge authenticate itself to the printer before it can be put to use.

- Differential Power Analysis

This type of attack was introduced by Cryptography Research Inc (16 year old Stanford product). It's an attempt to guess the key by analyzing the power consumption of a cryptographic device (e.g. smart card). I had heard of this before, but didn't know it actually works!

- The PhD guy

I met a guy who is joining Stanford's CS PhD program coming fall. He graduated around 1995 (!!) and worked for Cryptographic Research Inc for last 16 years. Now, given the fact that they've sold off the firm to Rambus (another Stanford product, EE HOD owns this one), he has made up his mind to go back to school! One crazy career path !! :D

- Indians

The number of Indians at the expo was astoundingly high and I found it irritating for some reason. Is tech all that Indians do in US?

All in all, silicon valley is promising. Lot of intelligent people are working on variety of interesting and challenging problems. Question is whether you want to be one of those.