Google drive: a missed opportunity

No, I am not talking about whether launching Google Drive was too late. Nor whether it was up par with available services. Many people have expressed their views.

What I was thinking was in a research perspective. Now and then there are research about tracing the social influence map of the internet. While releasing the products like Google Drive, Google/ or any company gets a rare opportunity to map the influence or spread of it.  For example a news splash by techcrunch might be spread much faster than say another site with similar theme.
What Google could have done was incentive-tize the process of referring the Google Drive. For example, Dropbox and Sugarsync (yes they have referral links) give the referral links for people who want to recommend it to their friends/mass. Studying the click through rate via referral link, can be done by enabling invite only through Emails ("Give G-drive to your friend").

This is not only true for Google, but also to any other company who is planning to release a new product, that could go vibrating in the web.
My assumption is that by studying the spread of influence, it might be useful to infer how the news spread in the human network. Or, at the least, who is the most relevant networker to get the point across.

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Color-coded boarding scheme

The airlines board aircrafts in the ascending order of "Zones". Zone 1, 2 and 3 etc are called in order.
Everyone knows how chaotic and time consuming it is. Because the next person in line has to wait for people who are trying to stow their luggage. This creates a long line. So, It does make sense to fill the plane from the back and come progressively front-ward.   People with kids and needing assistance should be boarded first.

Recently there are various ideas being put forward to speed up the boarding airplanes. It seems that boarding from back of the plane and filling window-seat passengers are the best way [see 1 and 2]. I like the Wilma boarding scheme where the window seats are zone 1 and aisle seats are zone 3.

Having seen some of the schemes to speed up the boarding, I am inspired to propose a color-coded boarding scheme. My idea is closer to steffen's method (see figures).
In this scheme, instead of calling zones, the calling is dependent upon the color-codes say blue, green, purple, yellow etc. Blue and green color seats are  the window seats are are called first.  I realized that  in [2] it is similar to the wilma scheme.
If tickets are booked together, in the case of husband/wife/ friend scenario, they can be coded the same color.

The seats are filled from back to front in an alternate seats. As shown in the figure, 1, 2, 3 etc are blue and seats 19, 20, 21 etc are also blue. If 1 and 25 booked together, then they are grouped together as blue. The numbers 13, 14, 15 and 7, 8, 9 are green color. In this way, the passengers get enough space to move around to stow their luggage and should make boarding faster. The assignment of color code can be made while the boarding card is being printed. Alignment of passengers in the gate will make  the boarding smoother. Just an idea.

Steffen method of seating order. See [2 ,3] for details. See text for details on how it might be possible to make it faster by color-coded boarding.

The final result might look like:

Color coded boarded scheme. Blue and green are called  first by the  stewards  in a sequence.
People who booked flights together get the same color code as in #5 or #18.

References:

1. http://physicsworld.com/blog/2011/08/how_to_board_an_aircraft_in_a.html
2. http://arxiv.org/abs/1108.5211
3. http://www.citeulike.org/user/eyliu/article/9730619

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Clocking your Time-- Globally

Daylight saving is the practice of temporarily advancing clocks during the summertime so that afternoons have more daylight and mornings have less. Typically clocks are adjusted forward one hour near the start of spring and are adjusted backward in autumn.

The following video nicely explains all you need to know about the daylight savings time.


Back in the days, daylight saving time was thought as an innovative way to schedule people's work hours around the availability of the sun. The questions are "Does it really save the money?", and "Does it make people more productive, or rather less?" It has been highly debated (there goes ideas for few more correlation studies!).

Personally, for me, even though the DST says it is lunch time, my biological clock says it is otherwise. It takes time to get used to the DST changes, and that happens every time DST changes are made. In general, there might be people who are sleep deprived because of DST. To catch a sudden change is another pressure the body is subjected to, which might in turn increase the health related risks.
Thats why I think DST might not be effective in "saving" anything (cry out for more research!!).

Moreover, I would argue that in the age of internet, the whole idea of local time shall be removed. We all shall globally adopt the UTC. So, instead of referring to the local time and then going plus minus x hours for intercontinental communication/scheduling, one could simply refer to UTC. That means in USA east coast, a person who wakes up at about 7 AM will say, "I woke up at about 12PM (UTC) today". Everyone will adapt to the same clock, but will manage to sleep/work according to the local sunrise/sunset with reference to the UTC. It may sound weird to say that the sun will rise at 10PM (UTC) in USA east coast, or  12AM (UTC) in south asia, but it will be OK after some practice. We will all enter into the new year at the same time around the globe. Since UTC would be the only standard, it would be very simplified to, "meeting at 9PM"-- no need to worry about the country, place, or whatever. Simply pick your universal time!

You can see how complex it becomes for each region.
If UTC were to be the only time, one could say meet @ 6PM UTC! 

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