do you call it a headcount ?

Hey

While I cant believe that Iam spending time on this topic, I just cant resist writing about this. I dedicate this blog to those of my friend(s) who love to non stop discuss on these subjects.

Head count is always a complicated job when you are dealing large crowds.. And when you talk about large group of animals, it is more complicated. And when these animals that we are talking about are elephants, it makes it all the more complicated.

So how does the Forest department keep track of all those elephants in the forest areas? Do they keep an attendace register and call out 'Ambika', 'Radha', 'Kushboo' - mind you, these are purely fictional elephant names - so the elephants can come and give their attendance ? Nah.. Bringing together hundreds of elephants to one single area doesnt seem that good an idea. So what is that they acutally do? Believe it or not - they follow a method called dung count .. When I read about this article in The Hindu I was amused. According to the forest department, since you can miss out elephants in a dense forest a physical count is never near accurate, but a dung count is pretty much accurate !!

The best part in this method is that, for precision, a software is used. This software is developed by IISc, Bangalore. Am I to believe that there was actually a set of software engineers who designed and developed a system to do a census calculation based on defecation and dung-decay rates ? [It will be interesting to look at names of their database tables & columns in any case]

....And we on one side sit and crib about not having a domain-related work... I guess sometimes it is better not to have a domain at all !!...

Anyways, if the Census board ever decides to adopt this method to do a population estimate for the nation, I guess I can recommend some of my friend(s) who will be more than willing to develop software for that effort !! Thank God, we still do a head-count ....

Chao