Wednesday, June 23, 2010

AT&T covers 97% of Americans - How?

Lets try to calculate how AT&T covers 97% of all Americans?

  • Subtract all legal and illegal immigrants - They are not Americans
  • Take a good percent of Bay Area and Places in Connecticut and NY out where the service sucks.
  • Buildings where Americans work and can't make a phone call because of lack of signal. They work 1/4th of the day in these buildings so take 25% of all Americans in these buildings out.
So at any given time I think AT&T may only be covering 50-60% of all Americans instead of 97% as claimed.

Do not touch IIT selection process

For the record I am not an IITian. I wanted to be - a lot but could not be one, neither in Grad or Post Grad. And I do not think folks from the IITs are the only ones smart enough to work on the most complex Engineering problems. A recent panel has proposed to give 70% weightage to 12th grade marks - but I overwhelmingly oppose it. Why?

  • There are many students who do not score well in the 12th grade but crack IITs
  • There is no common standard for all the 12th grades. ISC is different from CBSC which is different from the state boards.
  • Do not melt down the brand. IIT is meant to cater only the finest of the brains and is not an institute to produce just Engineers. There will always be plenty of good students who would be successful if they study in IIT but then there are plenty of RECs and State run Engineering Colleges that are not so far behind in their standards.
  • IITs do not have resources to handle a huge stream of students and a College in every other city and still keep the same standards it is known for.