Vijee Venkatraman

Home > Articles by: Vijee Venkatraman

Meterpodu: Fare Game

Once upon a time, auto rickshaws in Madras had functioning meters, so the legend goes.Asking the auto drivers to turn on that boxy contraption today is like committing a small crime. The unrevised, state-fixed fare is blatantly unfair to these men in khaki. But pay...

Particle Physics At The Crossroads

Prof. Rohini Godbole, particle physicist, is a researcher at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. In a parallel universe, she would have been a Bank of Maharasthra employee: she was offered a job after she topped Pune University in B.Sc., Physics. “The salary was almost...

The Scent Expert

We humans use a combination of our five senses — sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste — to navigate the everyday world. Among those who operate without the benefit of one or more of these senses, the blind and the deaf have our immediate sympathy....

A Computer Scientist In a Lab Coat

In 1994, the world was on the verge of the dot-com boom and Ron Weiss, a graduate student in the computer science program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, had just earned a master’s degree for his work on a Web application...

At MIT, dine like a 14th-century nobleman

"For over a decade, during the Independent Activities Period between semesters, MIT has offered a non-credit class on “old food’’ from the region around the Mediterranean Sea. The idea came from conversations history department chair Anne McCants, who teaches the class, had with a colleague...

One Minute with Nicholas Negroponte

Can tablet computers "parachuted" into remote areas transform childhood learning, asks Nicholas Negroponte, the man behind One Laptop per Child You'll helicopter computers into remote areas so the children there can teach themselves to read and write. Where did the idea come from? One Laptop...