Living a dog’s life October 31, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in life.add a comment
I havent made a grand wish-list ever, but one of the things would be to actually inhabit a animal’s mind, and if I could choose that of my own dog back in India. ( Now that I find myself ( trying to find time to be ) reading this )
I dont understand what Baggy is upto, what he thinks, what he thinks of me and what he remembers. When I was in Manipal after 500 days in the United States, he took a close look at me for 10 seconds, and few sniffs later, he was in my arms, all the licking, biting, dancing and the usual stuff. He played and expected all tricks and games he wouldnt expect from any of the others ( dad/mom/bharath) at home. So he knows me but I would like to know what name he has for me 
!
He also does have a reasonable idea of the world he inhabits and most importantly, he understands context. Now in this picture below, he is cosying up to Ashwin, my cousin who is visiting Manipal.
This is okay because Ashwin probably spent a few hours inside the house and Baggy considers that “well, if folks dont have a problem with him, maybe I shouldnt.” Tomorrow Ashwin walked into the house on his own, he would be Baggy’s breakfast. That Ashwin is an officer in the Indian Navy would be his last concern !
No matter how smart he thinks he is, this picture on the German subway will definitely give him a culture shock ! Link from here.
More on Baggy here and a video here.
The Last time …. October 31, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in reminisces-1990s.add a comment
I get some kick by keeping track of some of these statistics that somehow point to the way I brought myself up ( the usage is deliberate) and circumstances that were sometimes the causes and at others, consequences of my upbringing. This is just for the sake of record.
Last watched a Hindi movie – Jan 2006 ( 15, Park Avenue – prior to that Aug 2005 – Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi )
Last watched a movie in a theater – May 2004 ( last before that – Oct 1999 !! )
Last visited native place – July 2001
Last birthday celebrated ( bash/dinner/cake etc. ) – Oct 1994
Last gone out with family – May 1993
Last sob – Before June 1993
Last burst Diwali crackers – Oct 1992
and ‘inspite’ of it all, life has been interesting, exciting and worth living. I am no short of stories to tell you and your grandchildren. .
I dedicate this post to those who have a hard time believing there is more than just one way.
Balding – a revolutionary discovery ! October 29, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in KREC, humor, life.add a comment
This is a recent exchange with Aditya Paranjape. One of Aditya’s (several) claims to fame is the Karnataka CET 1999 Engineering Rank 1. My rank was also 1 if it were represented in Logarithm to the base 1076 ! Turns out while he worked hard on the exam, I worked hard on the representation !
However, one of his claims to shame though is this trend – my KREC roommate of 1999-2000, neighbouring room of 2000-01, neighbouring floor of 2001-02 and neighbouring hostel block of 2002-03. So you get the idea of what he went through.
Anyway, here is Paranjape on seeing my balding Orkut profile picture – at the time same as my picture here.
Aditya : Your bald pate is scary man – somehow I see my future in it!!Sharath : u ? and bald ? no way, kidding arent you !! balding is not the privilege of all the sundry
Aditya : Man – my dad is bald, my grandpa too…my uncle is growing bald….and my hairline has just started receding!! Am I getting wiser or what?
Sharath : i am already bald and my dad is starting to bald. In my family, heriditary runs the opposite way !
Reminds me of the quote – “Insanity is hereditary, you get it from your children”.
Stunned ! October 29, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in india, littlerockers, reminisces-1990s, sport.1 comment so far
I was so stunned by a recent statistic I just read that I left everything aside to pen this post down. This post comes with all the usual disclaimers, in other words – not for the faint hearted. If you have a weak heart, please dont read.
The last time India beat Australia chasing was on April 25th, 1998.
Yeah, that was the Coca Cola cup final – the match after the famous ’sandstorm match’ ( entire match up here !). I saw that on Cricinfo a while ago but cant find the link 
.
Anyway, lets put that in perspective. In April 1998, I was just about to enter Class XII working towards my JEE exams. I hadnt sent my first email, ever gotten online. None of my classmates were married. My dad was working. India wasnt a nuclear power, Vajpayee was the prime minsiter. Saddam was around, Musharaff was not. The state of Chattisgarh didnt exist but Iraq did !
And finally, Tendulkar was as old when it last happened as old as I am today !!
( A somewhat less shocking statistic is that its been nearly 3 years since India beat Australia at all. It last happened on Jan 18, 2004 – I remember I watched the match at Sadiq’s house in Bangalore – was on the phone with my schoolmate Deepa and Rajaram simultaneously ! )
Lets see when this will be broken ! On a lighter note, I hope India keep losing to Australia chasing atleast until April 25th, 2008, the 10th anniversary ( and Tendulkar’s 35th birthday). 10 is a beautiful number – both in base 10 and base 2. 
This raises a few questions – does this fact make that Tendulkar’s innings even more special ? Also does the Indian team itself know this ? Who would care though – only 2 people from that team of April 1998 are still around. Wait a minute – actually that must be reason the others should care isnt it. Because it also means that 9 out of 11 players have no idea what it means to successfully chase an Australian target !
Sigh.
That rainbow family October 29, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in contemplation, humor.add a comment
Angelina adopted a Cambodian boy, then an Ethiopian girl and now possibly an Indian boy. She has an interesting thought here :
I want to create a rainbow family. That’s children of different religions and cultures from different countries. I believe I’m meant to find my children in the world and not necessarily have them genetically.
Well, I too want to have a rainbow family. Being an Indian, I will start by adopting Angelina Jolie – that would bring a Cambodian and an Ethiopian into the fold as well.
Okay, okay, just kidding. I am considering sponsoring a child through PLAN. I think its an amazing thing to do and I am just mulling over it. Also considering things like boy/girl, age group and most importantly which country.
An ode to sleep October 29, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in humor.add a comment
Get up man.No, I want to sleep.
No man, you have a lot of do. Most people dont even perform to 5% of your potential.
Yeah, I have a lot of sleep to catch up with. I think I still have a lot of sleep left in me. The day I stop enjoying it, I will quit sleeping.
Tendulkar says the same about playing cricket for India.
Yeah, that is the difference Tendulkar and me.
Political affiliations n all October 29, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in America, ideas.1 comment so far
I took this quiz recently linking from Mankiw chacha‘ s blog ( my very Indian way of referring to one of my favorite bloggers ). Here are my results. Not surprising at all.
Sharath Rao, Oct 2006
Two years ago when I first came to the United States, I found the same quiz on the door while waiting to meet a Carnegie Mellon professor. And that point, this is what my graph showed.
Sharath Rao, Aug 2004
I remember being a centrist and feeling happy about the result. I am now a libertarian and and am also happy about it !! ( This probably suggests that we are all different but happy nevertheless ). I sent the same quiz to Deepak Krishnan then and remember him getting back saying he found that he was centrist too. Today, I dont know what Deepak would be – although his blog says : ” I work in a capitalistic industry AND I have traces of communism inside me which I am trying to erase.” Here is wishing him success.
Sadiq just got here from India and I made him take the quiz. And that is his score.
Do these quizzes matter ? Or rather do these ideas matter ? Years ago when I read surveys in the American media of what percentage of people’s friendships involved those of an opposite political affiliation or how many couples/marriages involved spouses voting differently, I wondered if that was an overkill, typical overdoing of statistics and wasteful surveys.
Not any longer. Considering that one’s political and economic philosophies dont matter would be naive – well, if they dont matter what does then ? After all, these are reflections on our ideas of morals, rights and wrongs and the place of an individual in society and has a tremendous effet on how we raise kids. I personally think matching these could save quite a few marriages. . I dont know too much about astrology and so wont volunteer an opinion on it but on a lighter note, when Indian households compare horoscopes maybe this is what they are actually matching !!
Waxing poetic October 26, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in CMU, humor, movies.add a comment
What do you call it when you are lying down on the bed, exhausted and lacking in sleep and when you get up in between, you feel as if one half of your body is heavier than the other and as a result, you are perpetually rotating about a rod passing through the center of gravity of your body. The perpetuity of this rotation means you keep rotating rather than settling down to an equilibrium position with the heavier side down. This perpetuity goes by the name of “graduate school” !
Or ofcourse you could just remove the rod which would cause you to fall and keep falling in the gravitational field of academia much like the moon is doomed to revolve around the Earth.
None of the above was any poetry (!) and since I over committed by the way of a lofty title(?), let me put in something that justifies the title. I leave you then with a haunting melody from the year 1959 ( an important year in history for those who care – Cuba/Tibet ). Some amazing lyrics from Sahir, music (SDBurman), great context/story, which appeals no matter what my state of mind, time of the day/month/year and picturized on the only favorite actor I ever had, or atleast the only one who has stood the test of time in terms of my appreciation.
I am done ! October 22, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in humor, ideas.add a comment
Thats it, I am done !
Okay, kidding. Its been a few relaxing days – consequently a whole lot of posts – and am now getting back to work. Lot of work, so blogging will be light for the next 103 years.
On a totally stupid note, how do we process such statements as above. For example, neurologists study cases of subjects being shown pictures of random people to know if there is a concept of such a thing as ‘an attractive face’ that is largely invariant of people and cultures even. They do this by studying brain activity in different regions etc. when subjects view these pictures. Here is an example of such a study.
Someone tell me how the brain processes obviously nonsensical statements such that – “This assignment is due on on September 42nd, 2203 !”
Please look at this kid and read atleast the first sentence of the article.
A place for skepticism October 22, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in contemplation, rant.add a comment
What do I mean by “a place for skepticism” as I mentioned in my previous post.
Here again, I turn to Steven Pinker who put it beautifully when he talks on the topic that eventually lead to resignation of Harvard president Larry Summers – “on the research on mind, brain, and behavior that may be relevant to gender disparities in the sciences, including the studies of bias, discrimination and innate and acquired difference between the sexes.” Pinker took on Elizabeth Spelke in a debate on this topic which you can view here. He talks about just how sure Spelke sounds about her hypothesis when he says -
Now, I’m a controversial guy. I’ve taken many controversial positions over the years, and, as a member of Homo sapiens, I think I am right on all of them. But I don’t think that in any of them I would say there is “not a shred of evidence” for the other side, even if I think that the evidence favors one side. I would not say that the other side “can’t even make a case” for their position, even if I think that their case is not as good as the one I favor. And as for saying that a position is “as conclusive as any finding in science” — well, we’re talking about social science here! This statement would imply that the extreme nurture position on gender differences is more conclusive than, say the evidence that the sun is at the center of the solar system, for the laws of thermodynamics, for the theory of evolution, for plate tectonics, and so on. These are extreme statements — especially in light of the fact that an enormous amount of research, summarized in these and many other literature reviews, in fact points to a very different conclusion.
It is this certainity in matters where skepticism is deserved – religion, God, philosophy, much of humanities and social science – that puts off. In a lighter vein, people should be trained in probability and statistics so that they are more likely to use the terms “its more/less likely or there is more/less evidence to suggest that” when dwelling on these topics.
By the way, this post is not about the argument of ( women in science ) itself – more on which you can read here or continue reading this post.
A few good reads October 22, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in economics, ideas.add a comment
Random links I long wanted to put up here.
I love it when people get a taste of their own medicine – here is one for Kapil Dev.
Hard to believe this article comes from Paul Krugman !
Such moral outrage is common among the opponents of globalization–of the transfer of technology and capital from high-wage to low-wage countries and the resulting growth of labor-intensive Third World exports. These critics take it as a given that anyone with a good word for this process is naive or corrupt and, in either case, a de facto agent of global capital in its oppression of workers here and abroad. But matters are not that simple, and the moral lines are not that clear. In fact, let me make a counter-accusation: The lofty moral tone of the opponents of globalization is possible only because they have chosen not to think their position through. While fat-cat capitalists might benefit from globalization, the biggest beneficiaries are, yes, Third World workers.
I tend to agree, though I am not an expert on this topic ( I am not an expert on any topic, by the way). In my opinion, poverty allieviation is not an event, but a process that takes time.
Here is an interesting article to the challenges and promise of string theory. No, you dont have to be ( just as I am not ! ) a physics major to understand most of this article. ( although being one you can no doubt appreciate and weigh arguments better ).
For nearly 300 years, science has been on a path of consolidation. In the 17th century, Isaac Newton discovered laws of motion that apply equally to a planet moving through space and to an apple falling earthward, revealing that the physics of the heavens and the earth are one. Two hundred years later, Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell showed that electric currents produce magnetic fields, and moving magnets can produce electric currents, establishing that these two forces are as united as Midas’ touch and gold. And in the 20th century, Einstein’s work proved that space, time and gravity are so entwined that you can’t speak sensibly about one without the others.
As I was reading it I was just telling myself, how Copernicus to Newton to Darwin to Einstein, every advance of science has broken the back of religion. The sphere of influence has decreased no matter what people would like to believe – more and more things that once had religious explanations now have rational scientific explanations that are testable and verifiable. Now is this part of a larger trend ? Maybe. Or maybe not.
What scares me most about those who propound faith based arguments is just how sure they are about what they believe in, how there appears to be no place for skepticism, no allowance for error in their beliefs and how they are prepared to defend to death the ’superiority of a particular religious worldview’ merely because they are born into it. Think about it – if soon after birth, a Hindu child was put up for adoption and was adopted by a muslim family, his idea of the superior god/way of life will be so different. Laws of nature doesnt heed to these circumstancial occurences.
Listen to Dawkins here. And have you heard of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
Pictures, data, songs October 22, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in CMU, ideas.add a comment
Took some time to summarize my India visit of Dec 2005. I know, I know, its coming after 10 months, but its just one for the record.
Sadiq is coming over this thursday and he might be around until Feb-March 2007. Thats going to be quite a change because I otherwise stay by myself, dont socialize too much and so under current circumstances, from 6 pm on one evening until 10 am the next morning, I am literally silent. The only sound in the room is of some music playing or some talk/video I am listening to online. Very often I dont speak too much even in the lab. My officemate Sameer’s schedules dont quite overlap and besides, when there is work to do, you arent speaking anyway.
So struck I was by this situation that I thought I should conduct some experiments like Berkeley psyhcology professor Seth Roberts and note down data on how many minutes a day I speak. ( that wont be possible, thanks to Sadiq , thankfully actually ), By the way, Seth Roberts is a pioneer in self-experimentation. You must read more about him here.
As a separate experiment, I have just downloaded the key counter that will help me “Keeps a running tally of all your keystrokes and mouse clicks. Shows how many keystrokes and mouse clicks you have made today, yesterday, and overall.” I will put up some data here in 2 months I guess .
As an update on the old songs post here, I was travelling in a bus with Indian students yesterday as a part of a Diwali trip. While a few undergraduate kids at the back of the bus were playing Antakshari, Abhaya and I were keeping track of the oldest song that would come up – to see how far back in history these guys would go. Assuming they were in the 1st- 2nd year, they were perhaps born around 1986-89. For a long time, most of the songs were from the post-2004 era !! Until finally somebody started 70s song – “Ek main aur ek tu, dono mile is tarah”, which I later confirmed was Khel Khel Main (1975) ! They sure had fun !
Costs of Education October 22, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in contemplation, economics, india.1 comment so far
A post here from Atanu again supports my position that my education has been highly subsidized.
Just an approximate calculation of my education :
Rs. 350 per month for first 6 years, Rs. 550 per month for the next 4 years and Rs. 800 per month for the last 4 years = Tuition+Food+Transport = 350 x 12 x 6 + 550 x 12 x 4 + 800 x 12 x 4 = Rs. 90,000 + books + misc. = Rs. 1,100,000.
None of the above was ofcourse subsidized – Little Rock is a private school and the Army School in Assam though a Govt. school charged us civilians rates comparable to other private schools.
What was subsidized was Undergraduate Education at KREC – Rs. 10000 per year x 4 = Rs. 40, 000 == $800.00. I would think the subsidy is to the extent of about 90%. So I owe the Indian tax payer atleast Rs. 4,00,000.
I will remember that amount.
Compare that to the education here at Carnegie Mellon – undergraduates pay $40, 000 per year. ( My research work pays my tuition and pays me a stipend that is more than enough for a reasonable lifestyle.) Assuming a dollar to be equivalent is Rs. 15 ( not the official exchange rate mind you !), its about Rs. 24,00,000 for 4 years of Engineering. And no, not that they are all rich and pay up – most of them have a debt of $120,000 on their head. And no, its not their parents that pay up. Typically, people take 5-8 years to repay these loans.
Its time to think of Education as a business – only then will the government be able to charge full fees to those who could afford it. More importantly, only then will the public understand that while primary education might be a fundamental right, higher education is not. You have to pay for what you get. If you can afford, pay. If you cant afford but are credit-worthy, raise a loan. If you arent credit-worthy, government can lend at very low or zero percent interest rates. No, virtually nothing should be free.
P. S : On a totally unrelated note, this post by Atanu Dey best summarizes my position on the Art of Living ‘Guru’ Ravi Shankar.
Silly Swaminomics October 22, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in economics, media, rant.3 comments
I haven’t ever thought really highly of Swaminathan Aiyar of Swaminomics from the Times of India fame. But this time he really went overboard when in an article in the TOI he suggests this :
But in India, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar will produce more than enough workers for all states. So, don’t laugh at Lalu for having nine children. If each of his children in turn has nine kids, that will greatly increase India’s demographic dividend. It is said that God works in mysterious ways. So does Lalu.
This is a Class X student’s argument. And Berkeley-educated economist Atanu Dey rips him off – a highly recommended post.
What puts me off about Aiyar is just how simplistic his arguments sound to me. And not just today, but back in May 1996 when he was anchoring the general election results in a program with Nalini Singh, I remember his remarks – off-the-cuff and somehow unstudied they appeared. Cmon, Aiyar, you are on national television !
I understand that he is writing not for a journal but for the general public in a national daily and maybe he is expected to not indulge in mathematical equations and statistics. Infact people who I know that do like him, do so for this reason – the fact that he is able to cut down on jargon, use a few anecdotes and get his point through. The fact that he might be misrepresenting or oversimplifying either doesnt occur to them or just doesnt bother them.
I agree that having been in the academia, there may be bias in the way I judge Aiyar. Besides, I am not economics or demographics major. Economics is serious, hard, rigorous and tough – predictions often go wrong and an economy is one of the most complex and dynamic systems around. There is little oppurtunity to conduct controlled experiments on a macroscale unlike in much of physics. Imagine – conducting an experiment to know if the interest rate should be set at 4% or 5% and measure parameters and choose the best setting. All one can do sometimes is learn from previous data and make inferences and hope that one gets it quite right. There is lot of space for skepticism. And not everything in economics is common sense either. For example : Why not print more notes and make people rich !!
So let us accept that some things by their vary nature are so complex that sacrificing rigour beyond a point is sacrificing the truth – that would mean you either lie or you dont say all the truth. In such cases, you would rather not attempt such writing – much of the writing in Economics coloumns in major western dailies (For eg: NYTimes coloumns, LATimes ) , is only meant for those who have more than an elementary understanding of economics.
Aside from the main point, I was looking for Swaminathan Aiyar’s credentials. Masters degree in Economics it says – what has he done since then ? Any link to his papers – have his papers been subject to peer review ? Why does his website not have a link to them ? What is his expertise in population studies ? At best he is a journalist reporting on economic issues – and that is not the same as being an economist. Sometimes, that difference matters.
New homepage, finally ! October 21, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in CMU, littlerockers.add a comment
Found sometime today to put together a new homepage. I like the way it turned out by the way – lighter on the eyes than my previous one . So in most respects, it replaces my previous website though the old one has some material that wont go into the new one – so it stays, but shall not be updated. Besides, the geocities page also turns up as the first link in google, so thats valuable !
Little Rock, my high school has released the 25th anniversary souvenir in the form of a book. They had invited article contributions from the alumni. I sent in two articles – both have made their way through. Here they are for the benefit of people who might not have access to the hand-held book ! :
a) The average littlerocker and the deviation from the mean – This is in collaboration with Ashith – its about what my classmates are doing since leaving school – some data analysis. If you cant read through, atleast the graphs are comprehensible. Takes 5 minutes.
b) Bus journeys and more – This is a single author submission, a (very) slightly changed version of this post here.
Thinking about America October 19, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in America, contemplation, life.add a comment
I came across Granta – this amazing journal/magazine recently. The special issue was about – “What we think of America”.
Having lived here for 2 years now, next to my home country, this is the country I know the most about ( even though I know rather little ) – in any conceivable sense – history, personalities, geogpraphy, people, weather, education etc. So the issue caught my attention. Turns out, its been written by some eminent scholars and they have a very different things to say. I am linking a few samples herein.
A German who was ‘liberated’ by the ‘visiting’ American Army in 1945
Gradually it dawned on me that the better I knew the place, the less familiar it looked. Just because they speak a language rather similar to the one we had listened to during the war, thanks to the BBC, and consume much of the same stuff from the same kind of department stores, it does not follow that we think and feel alike. And I find the strangeness of America a relief, if not a blessing. Different rules and habits, different cities, different beliefs and obsessions. Think of a place where cigarettes are perceived as more of a threat to human health than machine guns, where a casual acquaintance will offer you the use of their apartment with all their belongings included, where almost everyone believes in some god or other and where the outside world, unless it intrudes with bombs, is largely ignored! Surely we cannot pretend to understand such a society entirely. It will always be something else, a world unto itself, a Western Heavenly Empire, a China of our imagination, a place to admire, to be grateful to, and to be baffled by forever.
Our own Ramachandra Guha
My wife got a scholarship to Yale, and I reluctantly followed. I reached New Haven on a Friday, and was introduced to the Dean of the School where I was to teach. On Sunday I was taking a walk through the campus when I saw the Dean park his car, take a large carton out of the boot, and carry it across the road to the School and up three flights to his office. That sight of the boss as his own coolie was a body blow to my anti-Americanism. My father and grandfather had both been heads of Indian research laboratories; any material they took to work or back—even a slim file with a single piece of paper in it—would be placed in the car by one flunkey and carried inside by another. (Doubtless the Warden of an Oxford College can likewise call upon a willing porter.) Over the years, I have often been struck by the dignity of labour in America, by the ease with which high-ranking Americans carry their own loads, fix their own fences, and mow their own lawns. This, it seems to me, is part of a wider absence of caste or class distinctions. Indian intellectuals have tended to downplay these American achievements: the respect for the individual, the remarkable social mobility, the searching scrutiny to which public officials and state agencies are subjected.
A British man who just cant take it anymore :
Still, the fatal flaw of arrogance need not be dignified by references to Greek tragedy. It is enough to remember that Twain’s trip to Europe was dominated by ruins. America, too, will not last in its present form. In due course, and by means as yet unknown, the United States’s global hegemony will go the way of the British, Spanish, Roman and all other empires. Byzantium? Babylon? The one is suing to join the EU, the other is in the grip of Saddam Hussein. Forget the ethical hand-wringing. It’s about power, stupid; and power eventually sifts through a nation’s grasp like sand.
A Czech woman – a balanced view
For more than a century now there has existed a sort of American dream. For some it means boundless affluence, for others freedom. I am not a devotee of hypermarkets or of grandiose mansions containing dozens of rooms for just two or three people and a few pedigree dogs and cats. I’ve never yearned for more than one car or a private plane, jet-engined or otherwise. I have an aversion to profligacy, but I don’t share the view that there is an indirect relationship between America’s affluence and Third World poverty. Without idealizing the policies of the big monopolies (either American or European), I am convinced that America’s wealth, which derives from the work of many generations, is chiefly the result of the creative activity of free citizens. The Americans are not to blame for Third World poverty, which is mostly due to the circumstances in the Third World and the demoralizing lack of freedom that most of the people there endure.
As for me, though I have not written an essay about it, for now I will just say I think when I return to India, there will be a whole lot of things about this place I will miss. No, not the cars or roads or the clean air – these are necessities – their absence hurts doesnt mean their presence is the stuff memories are made of ! I think its more to do with me, my times, my struggles and the fact that it forms the context for an important period in my life and the contributions this context has made to my growth.
8 PM and after less than 8 hours sleep in the past 48 hours, a bad exam later, I must go home.
P. S: And well, fair enough, then there are a whole lot of essays on how America sees the world. I havent read any yet.
Advice to shopaholics October 19, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in economics, humor, ideas.3 comments
Something interesting from an economics journal.
Try to understand the following. If you are put off by the language less than you are enticed by the subject, you will get through to the end of the passage. And by then if you have understood it ( perhaps after reading it again), you realize this is so true.
We investigate some of the relevant accounting rules, and find that advanced purchases (e.g., a case of wine) are typically treated as ‘‘investments’’ rather than spending. At the same time, consumption of a good purchased earlier and used as planned (a wine bottle opened for dinner) is often coded as ‘‘free’’, or even as savings. However, when it is not consumed as planned (a bottle is dropped and broken), then the relevant account, long dormant, is resuscitated and costs associated with the event are perceived as the cost of replacing the good, especially if replacement is actually likely.
Okay, the above is stated in more human words in the same paper later.
We open with studies that document people’s mixed perception of the value of items whose consumption is temporally separated from their purchase. First, we find that people can avoid the feeling of having spent money when they make purchases that are seen as investments to be consumed at a later time. Next, we show that people do not feel that those purchases are costing them anything later when they are consumed.
Now, the question is why I am putting it up ?
To all my married gal-friends and other shopping crazy people – if you want to buy something, (say an expensive perfume or something), badly but are feeling guilty about it, just tell yourself that you are buying it for future use. This way you wont feel guilty while buying it. And then, dont ofcourse go home and use it – that would not only multiply your guilt of having bought it, but of having lied to yourself. So, wait for some time before using it. This way when you wont even feel guilty when you use it.
( All this assuming that you are not already practising this. )
Sorry husbands. And sorry wives, if your husband is a shopaholic. (assuming ofcourse that you are not ! )
Paisa ! Paisa ! October 18, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in humor, littlerockers.add a comment
An occasion for a good laugh today which I will express through the emails exchanged.
Hi Sharath,I have posted a cheque of $63 to the address mentioned below.
Confirm once you receive the cheque.Nadz
Sharath :
Paisa, Paisa …
Remember first scene of movie “Dil” – Anupam Kher dancing on the bed ??- Sharath Rao
Nadeem :
haha this amount is not enough to rip your pillow off
Sharath :
LOL !! ROFL !! LOL !!
After claiming in my previous post that I wouldnt care if Bollywood closed down in 1985, its embarassing to note that just this morning I was quoting Anupam Kher from Dil, a movie made in 1989-90.
Now among statisticians and their ilk, there is some saying to the effect that when your model (bollywood closing down) and the real-world data ( the year I mentioned) disagree, change the model, not the data ! Hence I now assert that Bollywood closing down anytime after 1989 would make no difference to my Indian Cinema experience !
More than just songs October 18, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in india, life, littlerockers, reminisces-1990s.1 comment so far
I have been spending sometime on Youtube offlate – doesnt have anything to do with Google’s latest acquisition ofcourse, I am talking about in the past month or so. I am scrounging around for Old Hindi movie songs and building lists for myself and others who care – people I know and others I never will. A few things of note :
Old songs to me means those before 1980, mostly concentrated in 1960s with a whole lot in 1950s and the 70s. Very few from the 80s – except for a few from Ek Duje Ke Liye, Bazaar, Masoom and a few others. Okay, nearly none from the 1990s – if Bollywood for no particularly reason ( or perhaps because they ran out of new storylines/plots ) stopped making movies since 1985, it would make no difference to my Bollywood experience. Yeah, I wouldnt feel a thing !
So here they are, few playlists sorted by decade -
The graph shows the number of songs by decades for the Youtube favorites and laptop collection ( local machine ).
Its rather inconvenient for most I know – for how often do we associate a song with a time period. We possibly associate them with the singers, name of the movie, actors its been picturized on, perhaps even the movie theatre/channel you watched it, who you had for company, maybe even the music director but unlikely the decade in which the movie was made. Infact I would love to see a poll of which are the most closely associated attributes with a song.
I see three reasons for this preference which I put on record here in order of their decreasing influence.
The mental map :
Somehow I find it rather trivial to store dates and numbers – its strange that it took over 125 posts for this strange trait to come up. Although I havent sat down to count, its likely that there is currently in storage over 2000 dates – not just birthdays or anniversaries but trivial things, stupid things, unimaginable patterns of what happened today last year or the year before or 6 years back. For example, a memory of what happened on 27th of June in 1997, 98, 99, 2000, 2001, 2003, 2004. Or state where I was on any particular day in say, the last 10 years. Or write down the dates of, if you give me 5 minutes, every single overnight bus journey I have ever taken since March 1998. Or just world events from history.
They arent already noted anywhere, no diary nothing, no conscious effort to try and remember, these are just there, present, stored somewhere in the mind and they come out in images when I seek to retrieve them. I have no idea how its happens, but I know beyond a point, it can annoy the hell out of peopl e around you. If I cant explain and havent worked hard for it, so its hard to take credit for it. Nevertheless you mostly feel good and never really regret it because its quite an extraordinary gift.
Actually, my own song collection on my machine follows this pattern – of sorting by decades. And I guess Rajaram is the perhaps the only other person who can manage this collection. Think about it – its not easy – if you want to locate a song and dont have a search facility, you have to know which decade the movie was made. If you know the movie, you can locate it faster than typing your query and searching for it !
Dad and Vividh Bharathi :
I am clubbing the other two reasons into just one because they are closely related. Most of these songs that I have listened to, I havent watched. I have just listened – either on CD/cassette or on radio. So if you play a video from the 60s or the 70s on mute mode, its unlikely I can identify most of these songs. But if you play the song on the radio, I could possibly tell you the movie, the decade, the music director and the lyricist with reasonable accuracy. ( Dad gets it right over 90% of the time )
Much of this is heriditary – whatever I could do, dad could do better and be more accurate at it. His database is far vaster than mine is. Infact, many a time when the prelude music starts playing on Vividh Bharathi, he would rattle the song name, movie, director, when and where he watched it, producer and some trivia related to the song. Often even the actor and the actress. And since many of these songs repeated or atleast movies repeated, I would listen to many of his predictions and pronouncements over and over again. Now listening to a song, I can do much the same myself, almost as I were just repeating his words.
The fact that it was Vividh Bharathi, an obsession from 1996 to 2004 when I left India, and not TV meant that I was left with the knowledge of the song and the decade ( but not often the movie name/actors etc. ) simply because the numbers were easier to remember. Somehow though music director and lyricist were easier.
The above factors have conspired to ensure that my memory of Old Hindi songs has a rather idiosyncratic representation. Hopefully, Youtube and the great guys who put up these videos up there will do something to rectify the situation !!
P. S: A lasting memory from the recent years brings together these songs, the radio, dad’s pronouncements and Rajaram’s visit home. That is worth an entire separate post. And very soon.
Did you knows about India October 17, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in economics, india.1 comment so far
Its not always that I get my hands on quite a bit of interesting data about India – reasons ranging from there not being enough data in public domain to me not knowing where to find it to there not being data at all !!
This post is so heavy in data that some might prefer to just skim through, although I would think some o of these are trends that are good to know.
About private schools in Hyderbad’s slum areas :
In each area, we found the majority of school children attending private schools. In the areas officially designated as “slums” of three zones of Hyderabad’s Old City, we found 918 schools, of which only 35 percent were government schools, fewer than the 37 percent of unrecognized private schools. In total, 65 percent of schoolchildren in those low-income areas attended private unaided school.The raw scores from our student achievement tests show considerably higher achievement in the private than in government schools. In Hyderabad, for instance, mean scores in mathematics were about 22 percentage points and 23 percentage points higher in private unrecognized and recognized schools, respectively, than in government schools. The advantage was even more pronounced for English. In all cases, this achievement advantage was obtained at between half and a quarter of the teacher salary costs.
So, there, as it is said, almost whatever the government can do, the private sector can do, better.
For something totally different but interesting here from rediff :
As against the common belief that India is predominantly vegetarian, 64.4 per cent families consume non-vegetarian food with the highest reported in southern states (92.2 per cent) and the least in north (40.4 per cent).
Backs up my statement when I say that being a vegetarian puts me in a minority even in my home country. Ofcourse this isnt felt because you are never far away from a hotel that serves vegetarian food in India. Infact I wont be suprised if it is found that though there are more non-vegetarians out there, number of hotels serving atleast a small variety of vegetarian food is more. Ofcourse, every hotel that serves non-veg does serve vegetarian food, but there has to be sufficient choice for a vegetarian for it to be considered ( unlike most places in United States ). This south-north divide was even more suprising !
I work in the area of information retrieval and this no doubt interests me.
Internet users in India—37 million at last count in September—will grow to 42 million by March, estimates the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IMAI). Indians also undertake over a billion searches each month, according to a report—’The State of Search Engine Marketing in India’—by the IMAI, a trade body of online content, advertising, e-commerce, mobile content and advertising industry.
Now, to put that in perspective, 42 million is larger than all but the population of 5 European countries. But we arent there yet – what is the net used for and how much a part of life it is – and how much people are willing to spend online decides the size of the market. But this is a sign of just how much growth there is to come in the long run ( which means not withstanding major or minor hiccups on the way ) in India and other developing economies in terms of IT spending by businesses. So when Narayanamurthy and friends are hiring 2000 engineers a month (quite a figure if you have been reading US media about job losses !), they probably know what they are doing.
And finally, here is an example of why businesses have something called an IT budget ! The boldfaced are facts I was quite surprised to know.
Full disclosure : I was sent this link for the simple reason that Sridhar Pai, who has been quoted later in the extract is my mother’s brother.
For example, take Hindalco Industries, the 44-year-old flagship company of the Aditya Birla Group—itself one of the oldest organizations in India, having been founded in 1857 as a cotton trading operation. Hindalco is a vertically integrated manufacturer, extracting bauxite from mines, transforming raw materials into primary metals, and fabricating them into everything from rolled products, extrusions, and foil to alloy wheels for cars. Hindalco’s product portfolio consists of more than 50,000 finished goods. Like many businesses in India, one of Hindalco’s biggest business challenges is managing exploding growth.
To help with that challenge, Hindalco turned to Oracle E-Business Suite in 2003. “When we started the project to convert our business applications to Oracle E-Business Suite five years ago, Hindalco was a [US]$500 million company. Now we’ve grown to $2.5 billion and our plan is to become a $5 billion company by 2010,” says Sanjeev Goel, senior vice president of information technology for Hindalco. The results are spectacular: “We’ve gotten nearly 30 to 50 percent cycle time improvements since migrating to Oracle E-Business Suite,” says Goel. “Production and sales have gone up by nearly 18 to 20 percent, but our inventory has come down—we’ve reduced our outbound inventory by about $12.47 million, while our inbound maintenance, repair, and operations [MRO] inventory has been reduced by about $1.69 million.”
“It’s beginning to occur to everyone that some of the large Indian companies, particularly the fast-growing ones in the automotive, transportation, and banking sectors—plus other sectors—are some of the largest growing in the Indian economy. They’re not just absorbing the software talent, they’re actually doing some of the largest deployments of enterprise applications on a global scale,” says Sridhar Pai, CEO and founder of Tonse Telecom, a Bangalore-based market research company focused on the telecommunications industry. “That means there’s a huge opportunity for companies like IBM, HP, Sun, and Oracle.”
All work and no play October 15, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in contemplation, ideas, life.1 comment so far
My leisure time is spent the most efficiently with nearly zero overheads and the reason for this efficiency forms the “About me” just alongside the picture you see.
Okay, let me back off – most of my work is done online – not just on the desktop/laptop but connected to the university network. So the romantic riversides and mountains will mean nothing to me if work is what needs to be done. No, dont get me wrong – not that they mean nothing to me per se, but unlike a writer or a theoritical scientist who can retire into the woods and mountains to become more productive, I have no such option. This by the way is true of many a graduate students doing experimental and indoor research.
So how is the leisure spent afterall. No surprises – reading and writing, mostly the former. And all I need to do is really just say “Ctrl+Tab” and the browser takes me into a world of hyperlinks. There have been a few saturdays when I have been reading articles/newspapers/blogs for 7-10 hours breaking only for a visit to the kitchen or the loo. Its unlikely ever that I would be found lying on my bed reading a book – those days seem nearly gone. The html page and the infinite links out of each one, to me is a dream come true. The only place I would be found reading a book is perhaps in the bus or waiting for one. I have been asked many a times if I get headaches or pain in the eye spending so much time reading stuff online. I will answer that question again – No.
I want to change this imbalance a bit. One problem is this low walls and thin lines between work and leisure is that its hard to keep track. Its easy to imagine ( and fool oneself ) that lot of work has been done while most of that time has been spent reading or writing stuff online.
Sitting here in my lab I can see so many books I have bought in the past year. I have been a regular at the 2 used book shops within literally a minute walk from my lab. A brief list :
The Universe and the teacup : The mathematics of truth and beauty
Cycles : How we live, work and buy – American popular culture
How to lose friends and alienate people – One man’s experience doing down the New York City social ladder
KGB : The secret work of Soviet secret agents
A Random Walk down wall street – How the stock market works
The Enigma of arrival – Naipaul
Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Freedom at Midnight – Lapiere’s work on India’s freedom
Love Visions : Chaucer
Utopia by Thomas More – Satirical work suggesting how unrealizable a utopia would be
Maximum City by Suketu Mehta – About the City of Bombay
Einstein, the life and times
Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond – The role of geography in western dominance
Waiting for the weekend – About how the concept of weekday has been historically and how its evolved
and perhaps 20 others – none of them technical !
Many of these are at different stages of reading and I hope to read a good number of these in the coming weeks – that might mean reading fewer blogs !
Infact I got so frustrated with this trend of having so many wonderful books here, lying unread that I ‘decided’ I would not buy anymore unless I am done with each of these or even 50% of these. That though doesnt work – sounds coercive and besides, I have fought this frustration by convincing myself quite successfully that I am infact a book collector, rather than a reader – rather a collector so that I can, one day become a reader. I admit that my success in deceiving myself into believing this ( and several other ideas ) bothers me.
To wind up though, I must not forget to mention what seems to me the prime reason why reading things online ( not just electronic, but with a machine connected to the internet ) is preferred to conventional lying on the bed, staring occasionally into the sky reading habits. Links and Search engines – the fact that you can at a moment’s notice ( to yourself ) wander off for no particular reason, or look up something if it were unclear – is a delicious prospect. Ofcourse, this sense of freedom and convenience, I once claimed, continues to ruin my life.
Above influence October 14, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in ideas, life, reminisces-1990s.1 comment so far
This advertisement here speaks so much for me, that I was perhaps 10 years back. I have the transcript of the ad down here, but to watch the ad, you will have to go here and click on “Awakenings” ( mid-left coloumn)
Awakenings Ad Transcript
(Scene opens with individual teens doing various things. Teenage girl staring into mirror, teen boy turning in bed, teen boy standing in front of refrigerator, teen girl staring out window.)
There comes a point in you life when you realize,
You’re not a kid anymore.(Clips of teens doing everyday things like brushing hair, getting dressed, and eating breakfast; All staring with concerned looks on their faces)
Suddenly, you have to make decisions.
You have to make choices everyday.
This is the time when you define yourself or you let others define you.(Teens are now leaving their homes on their way to school. Their faces express confidence and decisiveness)
You quickly learn that there are two ways to go…
Under the influence or above the influence.
I am above the influence.
This ad ofcourse is about saying no to drugs, but when I say that it spoke for the 15 year old that I was, I am talking about its utility as being beyond just drugs, its about very forming one’s unique identity. This is something every teenager and young adult must watch. Some of the other ads up there are good too – particularly “transformations”, the one in the middle of the 3×3 matrix.
I talked about Ads before here. And several other ads reviewed here.
evolutionary psychology and global warming October 14, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in ideas.2 comments
When I talked about the possible joys of motherhood/fatherhood in the previous post here, I didnt think about this article. Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert talked about before here, thinks there is a misconception about the joys of fatherhood – not that there is no such thing but its there for the reasons other than we think ? You might have to muster all your intellectual honesty and courage to read through his little essay without cursing him, something he is learning to get used to.
Whatever you might think about the above article, Dan has written something very interesting on global warming. Read the whole article if you can. He argues :
Why are we less worried about the more likely disaster?First, global warming lacks a mustache. No, really. We are social mammals whose brains are highly specialized for thinking about others. Understanding what others are up to — what they know and want, what they are doing and planning — has been so crucial to the survival of our species that our brains have developed an obsession with all things human.
The second reason why global warming doesn’t put our brains on orange alert is that it doesn’t violate our moral sensibilities. It doesn’t cause our blood to boil (at least not figuratively) because it doesn’t force us to entertain thoughts that we find indecent, impious or repulsive.
The third reason why global warming doesn’t trigger our concern is that we see it as a threat to our futures — not our afternoons. Like all animals, people are quick to respond to clear and present danger, which is why it takes us just a few milliseconds to duck when a wayward baseball comes speeding toward our eyes.
Because we barely notice changes that happen gradually, we accept gradual changes that we would reject if they happened abruptly. The density of Los Angeles traffic has increased dramatically in the last few decades, and citizens have tolerated it with only the obligatory grumbling. Had that change happened on a single day last summer, Angelenos would have shut down the city, called in the National Guard and lynched every politician they could get their hands on.
Not that everything he mentions here is new and something we dont know. But I am happy for two things – first, the fresh perspective it brings to the global warming debate, imputing blame on our psychological makeup rather than our political affiliations and secondly, hmm…oh, I forgot the second reason by the time I got here. Darn ! Maybe fill this in later !
I dont believe I claimed something to make me happy but dont remmeber what it was. Well, maybe its like sometimes its hard to recall your favorite song.
Good times, bad times October 14, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in CMU, littlerockers.add a comment
While I am getting struggling under the load of work, study and the usual things, a few good things in life.
Ganesh, my collegemate from KREC, pays me a compliment here. An IQ blog, he says. Well, I will take it !
And so does Angelo, the best known Little Rocker out there.
I cannot believe my last post was on July 29th; thats almost 2 months ago. I sometimes wonder, how the great Sharath Rao of LRIS fame manages to maintain several online diaries at once. I have a hard time keeping up with one. He is like St. Paul, writing letters to the Corinthians, the Carthagians and the rest of the world
I promised to write to Mangala, batchmate-friend from Little Rock, on the question of “how do you find time to do so many things“. That was 2 months back. It appears I didnt find time to do that !
I am rephrasing that question to how does it appear as if you have time to do so many things. I promised Mangala yesterday that I would write a post about it. If I dont do that soon enough, I may be asked to write something on “how do you so shamelessly manage to break your promises“.
One-eighth of the weekend is already over. 2 mid-term exams and other equally daunting tasks staring at me. I really wonder how many of my married colleagues, dads and moms some of them, manage to do their masters/Ph.Ds, without their spouse seeking a divorce mid-way – some lessons in time management hidden there. When I read the acknowledgement sections of the PhD thesis, everyone of these mention the support they received from their spouses and kids. Not at all surprising.
That causes me to turn the question on its head. What is more commendable – going through a gruelling PhD program with the emotional and moral support of a spouse and joy of fatherhood/motherhood while still bearing the huge responsibility of having a family ? Or is it quite the other extreme – being that lonely, single, struggling, stressed-but-responsible-only-for-yourself warrior ?
I would think the former.
Indian Oil, extroverts, school teachers and prison October 14, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in America, economics, ideas, india.add a comment
There is no way perhaps to connect the 4 phrases in the post title other than reading this post !
So here, goes, I had no idea about this.
Sitting on the edge of the water in the Gulf of Kutch on India’s western shore is one of America’s dirty secrets. A mass of steel pipes and concrete boxes stretches across 13 square miles (33sq km) – a third of the area of Manhattan – which will eventually become the world’s largest petrochemical refinery. The products from the Jamnagar complex are for foreign consumption. When complete, the facility will be able to refine 1.24m barrels of crude a day. Two-fifths of this gasoline will be sent 9,000 miles (15,000km) by sea to America.The company’s ambitions in Jamnagar have helped India move from being a net importer to an exporter of refined petroleum products.
Ofcourse that Jamnagar is one of world’s largest refineries was never a secret. Its the stuff in bold that is hard to believe.
And who says there is no red-tape in America. Here is how to fire a public school teacher in America. If you dont have the time to read through this whole process, can you imagine someone could actually go through it !
Here is someone on why extroverts get more than their share of stuff and why they shouldnt.
Who says there is no such thing as free lunch ? Was it Milton Friedman ?
Diversity and meritocracy October 13, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in America, CMU.add a comment
An observation I had to make from a meeting that I attended in NYC this week was about just diverse the research community was. There are 3 big teams which are headed by 3 researchers, two of which were of Lebanese descent ( one christian and another muslim ) and the other of Jewish descent. A few other top guys included a Iranian American, a whole lot of Germans, quite a few Chinese/Koreans and quite ironically very few Indians. There were an estimated 20% women, mostly American, a few Asians but not one of Indian descent.
I know its ironic for an Indian to be talking about diversity in America – we come from perhaps the ethnically most diverse region out there afterall. I have worked in groups in India ( at college ) with people all over the country but I didnt see this as being diverse or marvelled about it unless reminded – perhaps because I see them as Indians. Nearly every single friend I made in college ( countable on the fingers of one’s hand ) are outside my homestate. This is quite an exceptional situation in KREC because of the way groups intiailly are borne out on the basis of regional affiliations.
When people talk about how the United States is one of the more meritocratic societies and is getting more meritocratic inspite of 9/11, I dont think its an exaggeration. What bothered me most when I was in the meeting was simply that I was perhaps the least knowledgeable, least academically and professionally accomplished person out there. Not for a moment did it bother me that the number of Indians there were fewer than 10 in 250 odd (none of who I went up to speak to). And there is no reason to believe that this wasnt true of most attendees.
P.S : Okay, another thing that really bothered me was that there was simply not adequate choice of vegetarian food.
Evidence that the world is changing October 13, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in humor, ideas, life.1 comment so far
For the better ofcourse. Overheard at the NY conference :
Man to woman : Hey, how are you managing work ? Your daughter is just 2 years old right ? Do you have a baby-sitter ?Woman : No, I have a husband !
If I do get married, I am going to give my wife more than just one chance to say that and also motivate by (gullible and liberal-minded) guy-friends to do the same. Will read good books, watch good movies, author good blog posts, catch up with other friends who are doing the same, let our kids play with each other, do everything we couldnt do because we didnt find time and let the kids do everything since they will soon not have the time to – growing up afterall is a busy occupation.
Ofcourse, none of the above is entirely serious ( nor entirely a joke). But to go one up the seriousness ladder, I wonder :
a) if there is a study of how kids turn out if they are bought by stay-at-home fathers who perhaps work from home. Or even kids who spend more time with their dads than their moms.
b) Given a bunch of kids who you can observe but not directly ask the question, can you ( or an expert in the area, assuming you arent one ) point out with any reasonable accuracy as to whether the kid grew up with his mom while dad worked ( maybe mom worked from home ) ? Or grew up with dad while mom worked ( maybe dad worked from home ) ? Or grew up with both dad and mom at work.
At a future date, reading this post my wife will wonder if she married a spineless wimp who imagined he would stay at home while she worked. My kids will think I planned them as subjects for my sociological experiments. I will think I should have deleted this post.
The eternal question October 13, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in humor, ideas.add a comment
There was this post from marginal revolution about whether it okay for women to do this ! As one would expect from a reasonable person ( or to redefine the ‘reasonable person’ ! ) , I sent out this link to a whole lot of my gal-friends. I guess that list included some who are married. ( so that their daughters will inherit some good sanskaras ! )
Actually, the comments section of that post has something interesting :
Interesting. I don’t have an opinion on Dutch or English auctions but I did read last night in Stephanie Coontz’s “Marriage, a History” that in the late 1800s, and at least into the 1910s, it was men who had to wait for invitations to “come calling” at the woman’s home (where the couple would be hosted, and chaperoned, by her parents) rather than the other way ’round. Coontz quotes from the Ladies’ Home Journal where “a young man asked the advice of a columnist whether it would be all right to ‘call upon a young woman whom I greatly admire, although she had not given me the permission.’ He wondered if she would be ‘flattered at my eagerness… or would she think me impertinent?’ The columnist warned that such a presumptuous act would certainly incur the girl’s ‘just displeasure.’ It was the ‘girl’s privilege’ to ask a man to call.”
She says the dynamic changed when dating replaced courtship. Dating took place away from home and involved money. And because girls typically had few sources of income the boy had to pay, which meant by conventions of the day a girl couldn’t invite a boy out for a movie or a soda while expecting him to foot the bill.
Ofcourse I send out articles and links regularly and dont ever expect people to comment, infact many may not even read them. But in response to this article, one of my friends wrote back to ask if that was my way of asking her to ask me out ! Wow, sounds straight out of a movie !
With a different ending, ofcourse.
Looking back at 25 October 12, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in landmark-post, life, reminisces-1990s.add a comment
I received this birthday note from Vineeta Rao, a schoolmate, the actuary I referred to in my earlier post ! A quote she mentioned goes :
Inside every older person is a younger person wondering what the hell happened.
Amazing, isnt it. How so true ! Recent weeks have brought some truly unprecedented perspectives that, I believe, come with growing up. There is no better occasion to put this on record than now as I turn 25. There is no worse occasion than now to attempt it though, its going to take a while and I am tired ; I hope to have something put up here by the end of the month.
For now, a short little note will substitute.
I have now been a student ( in a literal sense of the term ) for 21 years now, but dont consider myself good enough at any single or more subject to single-handedly author and maintain a blog dedicated to it. There has been dabling with different things – deep academic passions – physics (1997-2000), Electronics (2000-01), Signal processing (2001-04) and mathematics and statistics ( 2004-present) and there have been deep non-academic passions – self-improvement (1994-1998), philosophy and psychology (1996-2000), popular science and culture (2001-present), Politics and international diplomacy ( 1995-present), Old Hindi music (1993-present), writing ( 1994-present ) , and economics (2005-present).
There is a problem however. Firstly, the durations I mention in the context of non-academic pursuits can be misleading for they dont refer to periods of dedicated study. They havent been intellectual hot pursuits with an eye on becoming an expert. Instead, these refer to periods when there was a honest and often a flippant interest in reading material on these subjects. So nothing really special, we are all involved in a bunch of things we dont mind reading stuff about. Secondly, as I was telling Kavya, a friend of mine from school, there has been no formal recognition whatsoever and for a good reason – there is nothing definitely solid about many of these indulgences – there are just bits of facts, opinions ( prejudices ??) and perspectives strewn around the mind like a things in a room that has just been burgled. And for this reason, there are so many occasions when I am in a position to say – “I am not an expert on the subject but this is what I read….”.
Maybe “being good enough to write a blog on a subject” is too high a standard to judge one’s knowledge. Maybe depth is just one of the criterions out there and the economist in me reminds me of the tradeoffs between depth and breath that are invariably involved. What is important is whether the process of flirtation with varied interests has been enjoyable at all. No question about it.
Work sets you free October 11, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in CMU, ideas, life.1 comment so far
I have often been asked by friends about what is it I am working on or what exactly I mean when I say “doing research”. Some of my common replies have been a) Speech Translation b) Mathematics and Statistics c) “Don’t ask man, lets talk anything except work”. This is ironic because graduate students and faculty members love to talk about their work and are given to think that what they do is really so important that every person on this earth must know about it. I have no idea why I haven’t been so excited about talking about things I work on; definitely not because its anything defense sensitive ( if it were, an Indian National wouldnt have been working on it ! ). So this post hopefully makes amends.
I am at a researchers’ gathering here in White Plains, about 25 miles North of downtown New York City. This is a meeting of about 250 researchers in the field of Speech Recognition, Artificial intelligence and Natural Language Processing. This is a part of what is called the GALE project, a project funded by the Defense advanced research projects agency (DARPA ). ( One of DARPA’s project lead to the birth of the internet ). This is also the project that funds my education, i.e. my tuition and stipend comes from the money that is allocated to this project. Now here is what the GALE project is about, right off their website.
The goal of the GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) program is to develop and apply computer software technologies to absorb, analyze and interpret huge volumes of speech and text in multiple languages, eliminating the need for linguists and analysts and automatically providing relevant, distilled actionable information to military command and personnel in a timely fashion. Automatic processing “engines” will convert and distill the data, delivering pertinent, consolidated information in easy-to-understand forms to military personnel and monolingual English-speaking analysts in response to direct or implicit requests.
To strip off the jargon, here is what you would do. You are watching an Arabic speech given by Saddam Hussein on TV. You know only English, don’t understand Arabic but have a question about the speech he just made. Now you are required to design a system such that you should be able to type your question in English and the system should be able to answer your question (obviously in English) !! All of this should be completely automatic – at no stage should there be any human involved!! This means the system should first convert Arabic Speech to Arabic text (Speech Recognition), translate this Arabic text to English text (Speech Translation) and then use Google like information retrieval techniques to extract the answer to your question. (if it exists)
Ofcourse this is a huge project with over 300 researchers all over 15 research labs in North America and Europe working on it. The research community has been grouped into 3 teams, each of which have 4-5 research labs. Carnegie Mellon University is grouped with IBM, Stanford University, University of Maryland College Park, Johns Hopkins and Brown University.
I am working on two parts of this huge system – on improving the translation accuracy by breaking sentences into meaningful and manageable parts and then cleaning up the this text by removing disfluent utterances. This involves whole of statistical analysis and no knowledge of language itself, after all its automatic. I know neither Arabic nor Chinese and for me these are mere mathematical symbols that need to be manipulated.
So I was here to give a talk ( mine was one among 25 other talks ) describing the work we have been doing in the past few months at Carnegie Mellon. It has been quite an occasion, being perhaps the youngest in that hall of 250 people with a good number of people working in this field even before I was born. So in some sense it was still among the most important talks I ever gave and it went off quite okay. No, dont let this generate responses like “Man, you are going places” (like a friend remarked), there was not anything outstanding about the work itself and I would have been far happier to have got better results. But 2 years back when I was applying to universities in the United States, if someone had offered me this view of the future, I would have gladly taken it.
There wasn’t a better place to turn 25.
P.S: It appears that the last few days have seen some kind of a blogging high. I still have enough material to write atleast 5 different posts, just no energy. Maybe I should get myself one of these.
P.P.S: The title of this post, if readers can connect the dots, is rather gross.
That thing you wrote ! October 11, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in blogging.1 comment so far
Some time back in this post I alluded to how it would be to chance upon an old piece of writing that you haven’t read in years or perhaps never remembered you wrote. I said :
And why is it important at all to know what we once were like ? Deny how much ever you want but if somebody came to you and told you that she has a letter you wrote to her 15 years ago in Grade II, what wouldnt you give to take a look at it ? Even given that a 7 year old would hardly have had thoughts that would reach millions and change the world ?
When this ‘new piece of writing’ is an old blog that was discarded after a few posts, nothing like it.
I regularly do this : Sharath Rao i.e. frankly, these are vanity searches on google. It interests me to know what people can see ( typically page 1 and 2 ) if they are looking for me online. These can be prospective employers, old schoolmates and collegemates. My old homepage shows up on top and this blog on number 5. ( My goal is to get this blog on top. ) Its heartening to know that all one needs to contact me for any reason ( especially long lost classmates ) is an internet connection and a search engine. If that happens to be google, well, great.
Now, obviously there are several people who I share my name with, so links to the other guys appear as well. Now instead of searching for the name, should I have searched for my email ID, one would expect links more closely related to my name to show. ( since logically ones email ID is hopefully more unique. And that is exactly what happened when for no particular reason I happened to search for my email ID – an old discarded blog showed up.
So here it is. ( If you have a comment, please leave it on this post rather than on the older blog )
No, not me October 11, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in humor.add a comment
I would never do this.
Here is a mail I wrote in May 2005 to my school friends about the my balding phenomenon.
Some sense of humor that ! October 10, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in America, humor.add a comment
Its been some serious/irony-drenched posts for quite a while. So here are links to some really funny readings.
“On why I would date an actuary” – my friend from Little Rock and now a London-based actuary Vineeta Rao might just be wishing that post was written by a male.
To the guy I gave the skull to – incredibly goofy-funny.
I can’t imagine how weird it must have been to have some woman run onto a train, shove a skull in your hand and tell you it’s yours. So I’m just writing this to let you know it wasn’t a voodoo ritual, an ominous mafia warning, a gang initiation, or a misguided attempt at getting to know you better. I truly thought you dropped your skull.Now what did you do with it? I’m dying to know!
On automatic flushing toilets – Probably the funniest, this girl have an amazing sense of humor !
Prelude :
Dear only working toilet in women’s bathroom:Hi. It’s me: the girl that visits you at least three times a day from 8am to 5pm. I try not to. I try to avoid you until I get home, but I can’t. That is why you and I need to talk. I’m sure you are aware of your little problem. Your sensor is messed up and decides to flush every 30 seconds whether my ass is sitting on you or not.
Fix my toilet and I will love you forever – Sorry about sticking to the toilet topic but this one is with graphics, where he says :
I can’t afford a plumber but let me just say that the toilet is turning neat shades of green now and I want to puke every time I walk by. The three year old does not understand to stop flushing!What I have: well, I do get paid in two weeks, but I’ll die from gas fumes by then
a fax/copier laser thingie- one year old, world’s oldest treadmill
Misleading or mistakening October 10, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in America, india, media.add a comment
My jaw dropped when I read this headline from a rediff story. “Indians in US have grown by 50 pc in 5 years”, it said.
And this is actually what the article intends to state :
Immigrants from India in the Washington metropolitan area have grown by an additional 50 per cent over the last five years and foreign-born Indians now rival Koreans as the area’s second most populous group, a media report said on Monday.
I hope that is a mistake rather than eyeball chasing tactics. That apart, the article has some useful information for those who care.
Funniest sentence I read today October 9, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in humor, rant.2 comments
Linked from here.
“Muslims have noted with concern that the values of tolerance are eroding and there is now shrinking space for others’ religious, social and cultural values in the West,” said a statement sent to Reuters by the Jeddah-based OIC, the world’s largest Islamic grouping.
This is a statement dated March 2003 from Saudi Arabia’s Defense minister, Prince Sultan.
As Islam’s birthplace, Saudi Arabia will never allow churches to be built, said Prince Sultan, the defense minister. “This country was the launch pad for the prophecy and the message and nothing can contradict this, even if we lose our necks,” Sultan said in comments reported by Saudi newspapers. Those who want to establish churches “are, unfortunately, fanatics,” Sultan said. “There are no churches – not in the past, the present or future. … Whoever said this must shut up and be ashamed.”
I am truly at a loss of words.
A break from blogging October 9, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in blogging.add a comment
I am traveling to NYC for good part of this week. Blogging will be light. With 9 posts in less than 24 hours, I have hopefully made up
Gunning for Bhagwati October 9, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in contemplation, economics, india.1 comment so far
In some sense, a man and woman are married the moment they decide to live together for the rest of their life. Commitment then must be an amazing ( and unimaginable ) state of heart, or for the unromantically unchallenged, a state of mind ! That is probably what gets people wondering what afterall does a formal marriage ceremony do that has already not happened. ( the ‘permission’ to have kids ??, in some societies atleast )
Well, I think the same is true of economics. I am increasingly getting convinced that at heart I am an economist. I will never be hired as one and if hired, will definitely be fired as one ! Although I am not formally educated and informal knowledge itself is incomplete and half-baked, its one thing that engages me like few things else. There are more economists in my admired people’s list than any other category of individuals.
What else might explain that for the first time ever, I will be following the announcement of a Nobel Prize in Economics like I follow perhaps a Wimbledon winner or a World Cup football winner ( frankly I care less about these ). In a little over 8 hours from now, 7 am, EST, the Nobel prize for economics will be announced in Stockholm.
Two reasons why this is something I have been awaiting – firstly, my interest in economics that has deepened over the years means the names will be somewhat familiar as opposed to say a Medicine/Physics winner. Secondly, two Indians are on the favorites list – Avinash Dixit of Game theory fame from Princeton and Jagdish Bhagwati from Columbia. The latter is better tipped infact.
Bhagwati, some may know, is one of the 3 with Amartya Sen and Manmohan Singh who are 1 year apart from each other that had parallel careers upto a point in the 1950s. They all went to Oxbridge for their studies, all of them returned to India and then the 3 took different paths – Manmohan stayed back in India, while the other two went back into Graduate school – Sen went back to the UK and Bhagwati came to MIT, Cambridge. Sen went on to win the Nobel in 1998 while Manmohan took an entire different path went on to make great and lasting contributions in a different sphere. The last time I heard Bhagwati speaking at a public event in India, he referred to the prime minister as Manmohan !
You must visit Bhagwati’s website that brings together remarks made by famous, some of them Nobel Laureate economists, on his 70th birthday celebrations. Here are two anecdotes.
From Paul Krugman, Bhagwati’s student and a likely Nobel Prize winner :
Those of you who missed the conference part earlier, there was a lot of discussion of who in the group was and was not an SOB – student of Bhagwati. And I am, of course, an SOB. And one of the things I came to learn, as I started to have students of my own, is that what your students remember is not what you hoped they would remember. You think they would remember your brilliant exposition of a model or your stunning blackboard technique, and instead they end up remembering the particularly good joke you told at some point.
And I have to say, one of my strongest memories of studying with Jagdish is a joke, which I have used in print – although the first time I was a little cautious, but I think I can attribute it explicitly to Jagdish right now. At one point Jagdish explained to us his personal theory of reincarnation, which was that if you are a good economist, a virtuous economist, you are reborn as a physicist, and if you are an evil, wicked economist, you are reborn as a sociologist.
From his wife and another distinguished economist, Padma Desai :
All of you know Jagdish as a brilliant economist, most of you as a loyal friend, some (including myself) as a close colleague, and a select few as a concerned teacher. I want to talk about Jagdish as I have known him, a devoted husband and an intellectual companion of nearly five decades, and a loving father to our daughter Anuradha.Actually Anuradha and Jagdish have been, from day one, fun-loving, sparring companions rather than father and daughter. When she was hardly three, her day care teacher asked her: “Anuradha, what does your mother do?” “My mother goes to conferences.” “And your father? What does your father do?” “My father talks.” She had figured him out early on.
I leave you with an extract from a recent mail I wrote to a long lost classmate.
Coming to what you have been doing over the years, a wow went out of my mouth looking at your specialization – Economics, English, Psychology – yeah, if I had another chance to do it all, I would have gone for pretty much this combination, majored later in Economics, become an Economics. Prof and uuh, won a Nobel Prize in Economics. Okay, I overdid that one, cut that last part.
In the meanwhile, Go Bhagwati ! Is he going to sleep tonight ?
I am not. ( I have an assignment due ! )
Us and them ? October 8, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in geo-politics, ideas, india.1 comment so far
I didnt know about this.
Jill Carroll, a freelance reporter for The Christian Science Monitor, was kidnapped by Sunni Muslim insurgents in Baghdad on Jan. 7, 2006.Over the next 82 days, she had closer contact with Sunni insurgents than any American who has lived to tell the tale.
..In her last hours of captivity this man told her: “Forget about the council. You can’t talk about the women or the children. You have to say you were in one room the whole time. Everything is forbidden. You must forget it all.”She couldn’t. This is her story.
Here is something more interesting, more controversial. I linked to that from, well, here. The link points to a post by an American anthropologist who spent some time in the Middle-east and his impressions on how Arabs are really different people. I think these are very interesting perspectives. And yeah, dont miss the comments section.
But, quite an intrigue that the author of this post is linking to a song from Omkaara when he is making a statement about the Arabs. This weird thing apart, I was really thinking if I really relate to the dance sequence or song at all, being brought up in so different a part of India. Besides, its been a while since I watched movies at all – and Hindi movies – well, perhaps 3-4 in the past 2 years. Maybe thats why.
The Arab way of life, is more than just Islam I believe. Even if Islam there were replaced by a religion compatible with their tribal code, things might as well be the same. Reminds me how Naipaul’s comments on how the first victims of Arabic colonization was infact the rest of the Islamic world. I also see that Indian muslims probably have more in common with Indian culture codes than with Arabic variety, although admitting that might be a sacrilege to some.
Madhubala’s gentle reminder October 8, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in contemplation, india.add a comment
A friend of mine in a jovial kind of banter sought to remind me, “Hey you, you remember that you are still an Indian” !
Ofcourse I am. Evidence – I prefer Madhubala in this Video rather than this one.( you might want to wait till 1:18 mins to see her face clearly). The difference – the presence of the bindi/dot in the first video versus the absence in the second. Why do I somehow feel infinitesimally more at home when the bindi is present ? I dont know.
Actually I know ! I dont think I want to get into a debate about how its mostly Hindu ladies wearing the Bindi/dot on the foreheads. So one might ask if I consider women of other religious denominations any less Indian ? Or someone prefering non-bindi women over bindi-ones is less Indian ? It might get worse – so do I discriminate against or find repulsive western white or Black women who also dont wear the dot ? No, I wont given into the tempatation of being drawn into a debate over this !
The point is simply this. Over 90% of my memories of seeing an Indian lady is with the Bindi. So while Madhubala’s bindi-less forehead by itself is not noticeable, watching the same fame within 10 seconds in the immediate next video with the Bindi, you tell yourself – wow, this is prettier/more at home/familiar-er !
Or for all you know, it wasnt about the Bindi at all. Maybe she was younger/older in one of the videos or maybe the setting, maybe one of the songs was more melodious or perhaps video quality is worse in one of them.
One is never sure. To irritate the reader a little more, Scottish Philosopher Hume went as far to believe that there is no such thing as cause and effect, its just perception. Nothing really is the cause of another.
I am not sure I understand that.
Honesty is hot ! October 8, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in contemplation, life, rant.add a comment
As days go by, the people we admire change. Ooops, that previous sentence has 2 meanings and I intended the non-obvious one. I actually meant to say we admire different qualities in people as we grow and not that people who we once admired grow or change as individuals ! Maybe I should have said something like – “As days go by, the kinds of people we admire, change.”
Some digression that ! Sorry.
Okay, so over the years, a new attribute has been rising steadily through the ranks and might quickly emerge in the top 3 qualities I admire in people. Intellectual honesty. I am talking in a broader sense than than the narrow sense of plagiarism rather something like this -
We inherently generalize, categorize, prioritize, and harmonize what we see, and most of this takes place without our conscious awareness. While these aspects of thinking are of inestimable value, they also possess certain dangers; for example, they can inadvertently lead us into hasty judgments, and cause selective “blindness” toward new information. Perhaps the two most universal informal fallacies in thinking are generalizing from incomplete information and overlooking alternative explanations.
One of the reasons I feel this way is perhaps because atleast in my perception, I find very few such instances of demonstrated intellectual honesty. This is probably because its actually a sparsely valued and therefore rarely observable attribute. Or because I am generalizing from incomplete information and overlooking alternative explanations for why I have such a perception.
And to that most admired list, I would add intellectual breadth as well although its not that high up there yet. Lack of intellectual breadth, something I am myself working to fight in myself, could be related to disadvantages in upbringing ( no, thats not my excuse ) or a late realization of its value ( yeah, thats mine ). It takes time and is more quantitative in nature than intellectual honesty.
Done with you Mr. Tharoor October 8, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in geo-politics, india, rant.add a comment
Just fed up of Shashi Tharoor. In the coloumn named after him, he has been repeated dealing with the same ideas – diversity, multi-lateralism and the usual fluff. I dont disagree except that it does not have to be there as often as he puts it up. Is he being paid to tell us things we already know, that are obvious and that are being emphasized day in and day out by all and sundry
His ideas reminds me of Nehru’s grandiloquent and utopic ideas. Tharoor might take the comparison with Nehru as a compliment ( has authored Nehru’s biography afterall ), but I wouldnt concur. Just few examples : here, here, here, here – thats one out of nearly 5 articles- the same theme. I am sure this man would be one of the most boring speakers to listen to for it appears he has already said everything he wants to say and now he is only going to repeat himself. Contrast him, for instance, to Ramachandra Guha !!
I remember reading his “The Great Indian Novel”, am glad that was library book. I would hate to spend money of 200 odd pages telling me just this – “Indian democracy/pluralism/tolerance is an example to the world”. So wouldnt really rate him highly as a writer either.
Lets have a man of action up there as the secretary general. Men of words should go back to their pens. (hmm, maybe myself included ). Besides, what afterall has the UN served us asks Shenoy.
Weird, really weird October 8, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in blogging, weird.add a comment
I dont think a new blog could possibly have a more weird beginnning. Need help uploading pics !! Hmm…
And to add to it, could it be stranger that a person who doesnt know you links to your first post within minutes of its posting ?
Update : Oops, actually that is the second post. The first one is more reasonable.
Test of the litmus test October 8, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in blogging, life.add a comment
What might be an appropriate metaphor for a blog ? Would it be a personal diary left open on the table ? Or messages scribbled on the wall in a market square ? Letter to a close friend/lover ? Notes penned in a book locked in a double locker ? It ofcourse depends on the blog itself. I have contemplated on this blog before – on why people blog at all, and in particular a note on why I blog. This post is perhaps a continuation of that in that I dont disown what I wrote then, but perhaps add to it in view of some fresh perspectives from a few blogs I recently happened to visit.
A friend of mine recently wrote to me about his apprehensions about his parents reading his blog. That didnt quite bother me because I exercise a whole of restraint when I blog. My litmus test of whether something can go into this blog is more like – would this embarass me or comprise someone’s privacy if I were to narrate this to an audience consisting of everyone I know and an equal number of random people I dont and this whole thing be captured on video on multiple cameras ? The second maxim – when in doubt, dont.
I admit that the above restriction makes for a very boring blog. Ofcourse, there is no faking or misrepresentation and while I might not tell a lie, I might not reveal all there is either as long as the above requirement is not met. There may be a whole lot the reader can infer from what is put up here – my general dispositions, political/religious views, scientific temperament – and the reader who knows me can perhaps connect some of the dots better. This is true of most blogs except that the degree to which this holds is different. My threshold is only rather low.
I wonder if I must increase that just a bit.
My litmus test is being put to test now. You can blog about two categories of things – you can tell people things they dont possibly know, link to them, analyse and opine on them. Or you can tell people things they already know – nothing brilliant, not informative in their content, but things they relate to and like to read. At the end of it, they may not come out better informed, but feel-good. And ofcourse, you can find your own formula to mix the two varieties of posts. There is a whole lot about subjects untouched, perspectives undwelt that I write in my private communication, ( and pertient friends can concur on this ) some of them might likely seep into this blog in the near future.
Is a good sign October 8, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in blogging, contemplation.add a comment
I was just reading through my previous post when I noted what I wrote in there :
Just after two 90 hour weeks leading to a conference paper submission ( and hope that goes through !! ), while still maintaining to steal sometime reply to emails, write blog entries to maintain sanity ( as I am doing right now before another night out with a huge homework pending ), I just wonder if it can get any busier than this.
Wow, I think thats good sign because it means that this blog might just be here to stay, that things have gotten to a point where I need the blog more than the blog needs me.
A little more and I am undone ! October 6, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in CMU, life.add a comment
Its this thing about how you dont know what you can do until you have tried it.
As a research assistant in IISc doing just research ( reading papers, programming, meetings and random talk in the lab and ) and no courses, I thought life was busy. I still made time to meet up with people and actually had a great time in that one year July 2003-June 2004, so much so that it ranks high up there among the longest periods of greatest satisfaction ever since I computed such scores ! I wondered though with a busy life like that I could take anymore.
Come September 2004. As a graduate student in Boston, taking 2 courses a semester and as a teaching assistant, managing a house on my own and being responsible for oneself ( which I think is a full-time job ), I again thought life was busy. I made time still, going around Boston, spending time online either reading something or staying in touch, talking long hours to friends back in India and an occasional trip to NYC, Niagara etc. I still wondered whether that was the most I could take.
Carnegie Mellon, Aug 2005. Research assistant again – which means there is always something to do. 2 courses, one of them insanely unfamiliar and competitive Carnegie Mellon. Life still went on. Did poorly in one of the courses but still managed the semester. And thus passed two semesters.
And now this, the third semester – two courses, both with a whole lot of workload. 1 lab with more work than the two courses combined. Research, must get a conference paper this semester ! And 4.5 hours a week of Karate ! Just after two 90 hour weeks leading to a conference paper submission ( and hope that goes through !! ), while still maintaining to steal sometime reply to emails, write blog entries to maintain sanity ( as I am doing right now before another night out with a huge homework pending ), I just wonder if it can get any busier than this. And one might be willing, even if able to take it. And would my view of this change, say I were a hedge fund manager making $200k an year logging 100 hours weeks ? ( Not that that is anything close to what I intend to end up doing, but a reasonable example for the current context.)
Something is true about adversity and challenge – at every quantum level, we tend to think that we cant take anymore. Yes, there are limits – physical, if not mental ; thermodynamic if not physical. But most of the times that we feel we have gotten there, we are wrong about it.
Back to work. One more such schedule and I am … !
P.S: Title paraphrased from the origin of the phrase pyrrhic victory.
Who is this person October 4, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in CMU, humor.add a comment
Okay, this is funny . A friend of mine sent me a few snaps of the pups at their house. When I emailed to ask what their names were, this is what I got in reply.
one is prince…The other one has no name…the two are always together..so call one and the other always comes along…
No name for the other one. Or is that a shared name or something. Poor pups, I now understand why the phrase “leading a dog’s life” must have originated .
Lets make this interesting. What does this incident suggest about -
a) my friend’s area of work/study.
b) gender
and reasons behind your answers, if any. Clue : No, not a lady veterinarian ! Actually I am considering having these quizzes more often. Getting friends to guess things about each other.
In a totally unrelated incident, this is a mail that went around at work today sent by our office adminstrative assistant.
Hi Kids,
Lately I’ve noticed lots of coffee mugs and glasses accumulating on the formerly unoccupied table. Maybe you know something I don’t, because I have never seen a dish fairy in this office. Not only is it inconsiderate to use a glass/mug and not wash it afterwards, (there aren’t glasses/mugs for everyone here), it is also Unsanitary. I know not everyone is guilty so I’m sorry for the accusatory tone. Tomorrow I’m going to wash dishes. After I do that, I know I’m got going to see any more dried out dirty mugs/water glasses around the lab.
I like this deadpan humor, but then kids will be kids. Dish fairies will be (illusions of) dish fairies, however. Sadly so.
Water water everywhere, yeah ! October 1, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in india, media.add a comment
The NYTimes is carrying a 3 article series here about India’s growing water crisis ! I really couldnt believe my eyes when I saw that. Why on earth would the Times carry such an article on a distant country’s domestic problem ? And the way its been put – hmm, well how many of us think water is one of India’s impending crisis. I atleast know one person – my dad. Not that he was armed with any data or research study, but each time he sees one of us wasting water, he just would say that the coming wars will be fought over water rather than oil. That ofcourse may be a little too early to say, but that was true atleast of the arguments we had at home !
Here is an extract.
The fabled Yamuna River, on whose banks this city was born more than 2,000 years ago, is a case study in the water management crisis confronting India. In Hindu mythology, the Yamuna is considered to be a river that fell from heaven to earth. Today, it is a foul portrait of crippled infrastructure — and yet, still worshiped. From the bridges that soar across the river, the faithful toss coins and sweets, lovingly wrapped in plastic. They scatter the ashes of their dead.In New Delhi the Yamuna itself is clinically dead.
As the Yamuna enters the capital, still relatively clean from its 246-mile descent from atop the Himalayas, the city’s public water agency, the New Delhi Jal Board, extracts 229 million gallons every day from the river, its largest single source of drinking water. As the Yamuna leaves the city, it becomes the principal drain for New Delhi’s waste. Residents pour 950 million gallons of sewage into the river each day.
I liked that comparitive figure – replace 229 units of clean water with 950 units of semi-toxic water. Sounds scary even for a laboratory experiment.
Seeking immortality October 1, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in economics, littlerockers.1 comment so far
Something here about why something may not work as well I would like it to !!.
Okay, okay, I get high marks for using 15 words to say nothing !
Well, before that about this link I came across about Harvard’s endowement size, the money that the alumni and other well-wishers ( usually both are the same ) contribute to the fund.
Harvard’s endowment grew $3.3 billion during the fiscal year ending June 30, reaching an all-time high of $29.2 billion, according to figures released today. The Harvard Management Company (HMC), the internal arm responsible for managing the University’s endowment, returned 16.7 percent on its investments. This year’s performance was “just above the average” for the 25 largest university endowments, HMC President Mohamed A. El-Erian wrote in his first annual “John Harvard” letter. It is down from last year’s 19.2 percent return and the 21.1 percent return achieved in 2004.HMC’s performance was particularly strong in emerging markets—the University earned a 37.8 percent return in this asset class, which includes industrializing economies such as India, China, Russia, and Brazil.
Insane, isnt it ! $29 billion dollars !! Thats probably Fortune 50 ! ( Actually, I checked, its more like Fortune 60 ) . They actually have a fund management company that manages these funds. Wow !
There is something interesting there – that Harvard ( I think others do too, only I am not sure ) ensures that not only does it get some of the best students, they also ensure that they get as much as money from as possible. How do they do that ? Legacy admissions. Rich Harvard alumni make contributions so that their rich kids go to Harvard, who generally grow up to rich, if not richer, and send their kids to Harvard. And sometimes, your father doesnt have to be a rich Harvard alumni, just rich would do. How else do you think so many of celebrity kids attend Harvard ? Ever heard of these kids go to the IITs ? Yeah, perhaps for a cultural fest performance.
Anyway coming to the point of this article, my school Little Rock is in its 25th year. And so, on an infinitesimally smaller scale than Harvard, they are seeking funds for the Silver Jubilee project I wrote about in the alumni blog here.
As an added incentive to contribute larger amounts, they have decided to have those contributors’ names carved on marble near the project site, who contribute amounts larger than Rs. 5000 (about $110.00 ) – a chance for people to make their moral claims to immortality. In most likelihood that building and your name will stand there long after you are gone. Think about it – where else will your name ever be carved in marble ? ( Unless you decide to do so on reading this post ! )
Little Rock are seeking funds from current parents and old students. I somehow have a feeling there will not be a significant contributions from old students. Firstly, there are few that are themselves employed for a long time. There are about 8 batches of students that are currently working with different earning capacities. Secondly, I think giving back is somehow not such an important part of our mindset, atleast not among the 20-somethings. Most people will talk about their great days at school and how they have learnt stuff, made friends and how Little Rock might even be the best school they ever attended, or that ever existed. But money is serious business !
Thirdly and most importantly, its not just about the alumni. Its about the school too. If someone was actually actively pursuing the alumni, things may have been different. Little Rock however, has chosen to merely put up the notice on the website which most people do not visit regularly. I think it requires real effort to go after people and make them pay up when they have no direct obligation to the school unlike for example, the current parents. The parents of current school students somehow feel more of a moral obligation and they will be actively pursued due to their accessibility.
The alumni, however, arent directly accessible, again because not enough energy has gone into it. Perhaps the Silver Jubilee celebrations cum Alumni reunion this December may help bringing the alumni under an official umbrella. But then that is being scheduled for a Tuesday-Wednesday this December. I fear the attendance will be much less than it would be if it were a weekend. The truth is that in most cases, people will find it rather hard to obtain leave from work and travel to that little corner of the world. The school might think – “If they really love their school, they will want to come.” The alumni thinks,”if the school really wanted people to attend, they would have scheduled it for a weekend.” In such a contest, it boils down to who needs whom more. Or perhaps that is a cynical way to look at it. Well, maybe the cynical way is, for once, the only sensible way to look at it !
I wrote to the principal about it but it doesnt appear that the event can moved to a weekend. I frankly dont know why. Simple game theoritical observations suggest that if its on a weekday, people think most people cant attend it. And since most people are attending the event to meet most other people who attend the event, more people will back out. The equilibrium for this would be that finally none will show up because everybody thinks none will show up !! Ofcourse economic models are far from perfect and event will be attended by a small section of people who are there to see the place, the campus, meet people who are certain to be there – teachers, non-teaching staff etc. and meet a few other students who are there for the same reason !! Well,
Some pessimism here isnt it. I would be happy if I were wrong, but not surprised if I were right.
And by the way, I just sent in my $115.00 contribution. Ashith did too. I hope many many more people do contribute amounts to their liking.
Some optimism isnt it. I would be happy if I were right, but not surprised if I were wrong !
Why do you vote ? October 1, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in economics.add a comment
I have never really voted except in a college class election. Infact, in one of thoese elections, I reached the booth to learn the polling was done and the election turned out to be a draw !! Maybe for the first time in my life, I remember feeling really important !
And guilty – the winner was decided by the toss of a coin. And the winner wasnt exactly the one I intended to vote for.
This article is really really interesting. I am pasting a section of that here because it is relevant to the idea of social incentives that I mentioned in my this post here.
Now as then, many people worry about low voter turnout – only slightly more than half of eligible voters participated in the last presidential election – but it might be more worthwhile to stand this problem on its head and instead ask a different question: considering that an individual’s vote almost never matters, why do so many people bother to vote at all?The answer may lie in Switzerland. That’s where Patricia Funk discovered a wonderful natural experiment that allowed her to take an acute measure of voter behavior.
The Swiss love to vote – on parliamentary elections, on plebiscites, on whatever may arise. But voter participation had begun to slip over the years (maybe they stopped handing out live pigs there too), so a new option was introduced: the mail-in ballot. Whereas each voter in the U.S. must register, that isn’t the case in Switzerland. Every eligible Swiss citizen began to automatically receive a ballot in the mail, which could then be completed and returned by mail.
From a social scientist’s perspective, there was beauty in the setup of this postal voting scheme: because it was introduced in different cantons (the 26 statelike districts that make up Switzerland) in different years, it allowed for a sophisticated measurement of its effects over time.
Never again would any Swiss voter have to tromp to the polls during a rainstorm; the cost of casting a ballot had been lowered significantly. An economic model would therefore predict voter turnout to increase substantially. Is that what happened?
Not at all. In fact, voter turnout often decreased, especially in smaller cantons and in the smaller communities within cantons. This finding may have serious implications for advocates of Internet voting – which, it has long been argued, would make voting easier and therefore increase turnout. But the Swiss model indicates that the exact opposite might hold true.
But why is this the case? Why on earth would fewer people vote when the cost of doing so is lowered?
It goes back to the incentives behind voting. If a given citizen doesn’t stand a chance of having her vote affect the outcome, why does she bother? In Switzerland, as in the U.S., “there exists a fairly strong social norm that a good citizen should go to the polls,” Funk writes. “As long as poll-voting was the only option, there was an incentive (or pressure) to go to the polls only to be seen handing in the vote. The motivation could be hope for social esteem, benefits from being perceived as a cooperator or just the avoidance of informal sanctions. Since in small communities, people know each other better and gossip about who fulfills civic duties and who doesn’t, the benefits of norm adherence were particularly high in this type of community.”
Social disincentives is no rocket science obviously. We are aware of it all the time. Consider you have a banana skin in your hand that you would love trashed somewhere. Two cases :
Situation 1 : Its 5 pm saturday afternoon on MG Road in Bangalore and the police are, for some reason, on a strike. The streets teeming with people but no trashcans in sight.
Situation 2 : Its 2 am on the Outer ring road. Not a soul in sight. And no trashcan either.
Under what circumstances are you more likely to just throw that banana skin on the pavement ?
