Posts filed under ‘CWorks’
Writing on Wall – Word Play – Hiatus Scusi
Falling into Deficits – USA Recession Obama – Zyglis
I suppose one could put any nation premier in the picture but I feel for the O-dawg for he has nowhere really to go. He is royally screwed. The more he tries pulling people out of recession (with the current free-money-for-all monetary policies), more deeper he digs the grave he will eventually fall into. Reminds me of an old Telugu saying of gramps, “mundu goyya, venaka nuyya” (pit in front, well in back).
India Demands Haagen-Dazs Apology – Racist Price
I really do not want to do this but I have to credit my source. Damn ye ethics –
Are we really that sensitive as to go ballistic over a cup of a hazel nut and raspberry duo that costs the earth? Come on, guys! That corny line about entry restricted to ‘international passport holders only’ was exactly that – corny! All passports by definition are international, remember? What’s a “local” passport?? It was obviously the brainchild of an immature copywriter taking a shot at being extra clever. Clearly, the ad agency got it all wrong, and now the excreta has hit the ceiling. Various groups have banded together to scream, “Racism” and demand an apology if not an immediate closure of the Delhi outlet. At the time of writing, public outrage was beginning to snowball into something major. This may change if something juicier diverts media attention, and bloggers discover a new bête noire. But for now, tweets by the nano second are flying around the world mobilising opinion against the brand’s provocative advertising
They say nothing works as brilliantly as publicity that hammers home a message – regardless of what that message is. Repeated often enough, it sinks into our khopdis and there it stays. After a point, not many people remember why they remember it – but the fact remains, they do! Target achieved. So it might be with the Indian consumer and Haagen-Dazs – the ice cream with attitude. We have taken offence (count me in!) at what is seen as a racial slur, a national insult, a crime. Our izzat is at stake and we shall go to any length to protect it. By over-reacting, we have done the brand a huge favour. Jaaney do. The latest controversy has led to a free national awareness campaign that would otherwise have cost the brand a huge amount of money. The ice cream is front-page news and a matter of heated debate across channels at prime time. Indians are bored at the moment. There is very little action to distract our attention.
A stupid ice-cream brand chose to launch during winter and is generating heat.
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Mathematics of War – 3 – Reality, Why and Other
The cartoon (inspired by a classic stock trading madness one by Kal of Economist which also reflects the allusion of financial markets simile) tries to address 2 things at a high level. The ‘why’ and ‘other’ side of the coin. Allow me to elaborate –
1) For a paper that flaunts to be the mathematics or ecology of war (strike-1: make up your mind), the core question of ‘why’ remains unanswered other than the broad strokes of generalizing it to violent primal animalistic human behaviour in a conflict scenario viz. ganging up and acting out of reptilian-minded self-preservation and just silly attention-seeking, message-sending, authority-opposing, loathing-fired, territory-protecting, family-first, religion-tampered, son-of-gun, honour-killing, blood-thirsty, cult-following, brain-washed, nepotism-led, arms-dealing corporate interest driven, virgin-seeking, nation-gaurding, eye-for-an-eye revenge. Out of the 6 wise questions of who, when, where, what, why and how of anything, it is the ‘why’ that is always most important and difficult one to answer. Unsurprisingly, it is not always forthcoming and so is the case with the current research/paper/letter/talk/hype/site in question. My answer to ‘why’ is not my answer because it has been addressed before. In any conflict, the main reason for all the tomfoolery is primarily a result of ye-olde mis-communication and bad decision-making. People act irrationally (or whatever it is the paper insinuates) because for all the wisdom of the world, groups only serve the purpose of amplifying stupidity and at discrete time-steps under pressure with only incomplete information and shrouded judgment as a way of life and we don’t have to observe a conflict to come to that conclusion. It is kinda obvious from shopping to ordering pizza. Patterns. Patterns. Everywhere
2) The paper does not address the most important element to any conflict which is the ‘other’ side. It paints the terrorists (putting on my linguist hat ala Chomsky, this is a wrong word in itself because if it is used, it automatically implies the branded-as-such people as bad which is just one point-of-view) as villains from the word go and does not give due weight to the acts of the ‘other’ side, say the state police or occupying USA troops in Afghanistan. If you ask me, the patterns of behaviour of the ‘other’ side are just as irrational and fueled by internal politics (no matter how hierarchical they are organized) and media sound-bytes as the insurgents (again, a bad and violent word that should not have been used in interests of neutrality). We all know it takes two to tango or two hands to make a clap or no smoke without fire or every action has an opposite reaction or what goes round comes around and such idioms. Not considering/mentioning, let alone understanding the role of the ‘other’ side and how they influence/provoke behaviour of freedom-fighters (terrorists by other name), is like saying – well, I cannot think of a suitable analogy because there are so many of them that apply here – the insurgents are evil by birth and all that the paper is trying to do, in a fly-on-wall (when it really should be cat-on-wall) manner is quantify their evil-doings somewhat like an overbearing God who at the same time turns a blind eye at the misdemeanours of his chosen people. It’s just plain wrong. Besides, there are too many Gods already responsible for much mess that has/going/will in the world but discussing religion is slightly off-topic, no?
When seen with that lens of favouritism, it is of course obvious that patterns can be identified in the reactions (yes, not actions) of insurgents. Suffice to say that what we are seeing here is simply a human collective not showing the other cheek when slapped and that maybe, just maybe, we should perhaps be more concerned why did the slap happen and importantly, whose hand is it that was raised leading to harakiri? Again, there will be patterns to series of events that led to this situation. So, my question is this: Can we identify “that” pattern of circumstances that triggers insurgency? I believe we can (if one looks closely and long enough goes without saying). If so, that will be the right path to understand misunderstandings. To the best of my knowledge from private communication, Sean Gourley is already at work along these lines and I hope whatever comes out of that is not half as bad as the paper we are discussing, er, opiniating. Lest I forget, as for the errors in data and analysis, I informally tried applying their methods to Kashmir situation and I was disappointed and felt cheated. The first thing that came into my mind was that maybe my data was not clean or my interpretations of the paper and formulae. It takes a great and beautiful mind to accept mistakes. Mine is certainly not. So there.
PS: If you are wondering what happened to part-2 of series, well, keep wondering. I did not think it was worth my typing and am famously lazy. You are however free to think of it as a forced workshop on imagining or maybe, Quentin Tarantino stylism
Male Paralysisio Pretty Womanoma – Clever Barber
As Seinfeld puts it, the male mind literally numbs down in the presence of beauty (in the eyes of the beholder of course) and advertisers really take advantage of this. Don’t you love those ads where you see the woman in the bikini next to the 32-piece ratchet set? We’ll be looking at girl in bikini, then looking at the ratchet set, going:
All right, well if she’s right next to the ratchet set, and I had that ratchet set… I wonder if that would mean that by transitive… I better just buy the ratchet set
Who knew, observational stand-up comedy could be so profound, eh? I have never heard of a beautiful woman ever getting a parking fine or speeding ticket. In fact, I am aware of instances where women try to validate themselves by committing a crime and see if they still have it in them to escape the lonely long hands of male officer enforced law. Apparently, it is not that hard and if so, they can do whatever they want. Flirt a little and a beautiful woman is off the death row. Flash a boob, or two, and a beautiful woman gets free taxi rides. Wars have been fought over women and many a friendship and kinship has been lost because of beauty. Gotta love the fair sex. Or comprehend the stupidity of the primitive male brain. Unfortunately, they are both impossible. Many people have tried and failed. Helen of Troy (not, Diane Kruger, you fools) is famed to have a face that launched a 1000 ships according to Iliad by Homer (not the Simpson, it should be said). Mel Gibson could have been very wrong. Women, not Jews, are responsible for all the foolish acts of men during entire tenure of primate history before and after civilization. That is a considerable amount of time and an extraordinary number of actions happening even now as we speak. There goes another failed attempt at conquest in a bar. Another feeble attempt at office romance. Keep on trying guys. To infinity and beyond and all that.
Cell Phone Communication Anxiety Addiction Shrink
Hat tip to Wired, “Our 12 (Or So) Favourite Techie Cartoons of 2008”. Worth a look.
Beggars Can Be Readers – Breakfast Newspaper
Joker of Year – Kalmadi – FIFA World Cup in India
Say what you may about Indian Olympic Association president Suresh Kalmadi, one thing can’t be denied; The 65-year old can make most optimistic amongst us seem like Arthur Schopenhauer. At Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting at Port-of-Spain, he surprised all present with his proclamation that once India successfully staged next year’s Commonwealth Games in New Delhi the nation could soon launch a bid to host the world’s most popular sporting extravaganza – the FIFA World Cup. Ironically his promulgation was made in Trinidad and Tobago, which in 2006 became the smallest nation to ever qualify for the quadrennial showcase with a population just exceeding one million. The closest India, with a population of over a billion, have come to gracing world football’s biggest stage was in 1950 when it qualified for the World Cup held in Brazil but were eventually unable to compete as the team played barefoot. Cutting to the ground reality, Kalmadi ignored probably the most important element to host a football World Cup – the infrastructure.
FIFA sets a minimum requirement of 12 stadiums capable of seating at least 40,000 spectators, while a stadium with a minimum capacity of 80,000 is required for the opening match and the final. At present, India has just one stadium which matches up to AFC criteria, where the minimum allowed capacity is 20,000 – the Gachibowli Stadium in Hyderabad. The national team’s preferred home venue, the Ambedkar Stadium, which has been the sight for many a historic triumph, falls short of matching-up to AFC standards. If that doesn’t bode well, the scenario with the training facilities is even bleaker. India is so woefully short of training facilities that national team is forced to train in high school playgrounds during prestigious tournaments like AFC Challenge Cup and the Nehru Cup and has to routinely travel abroad for national camps as there are no training facilities in the country.
National team coach Bob Houghton, more of a realist than Kalmadi, has more than once stated that before we start dreaming of qualifying for the World Cup, much less dream of hosting it, we should keep in mind that the two biggest and most historic clubs in the country – East Bengal and Mohun Bagan – don’t have their own training grounds even after over 100 years of existence. With the hosts for the 2018 and 2022 FIFA World Cups being announced together in 2011, India doesn’t have a chance at making a bid before 2026 and even so, one wonders how successful a bid from a nation which has never qualified for the World Cup would be.
[Tweet – 20091225]: Ultimate irony that India could not compete in 1950 world cup in Brazil is that they played “barefoot” a sport called football – not, bootball. Classic
Recession and High Prices = Empty Christmas
Rise of External Brain – Prosthetic Memory – Chaos
Where were we? Ah yes, my research. That ship has sailed but the light is being carried by Jim Gemmell and Gordon Brown. They recently brought out a book called “Total Recall” that has come out and their blog has some wonderful pointers of how we are on the path to create digital surrogates on the web already. Our bookmarks, history, thoughts, expertise, appointments, events, friends, bits, interests, locations, places, reminders, TV shows, artifacts like photos are all being archived/available on the web and with the right aggregator and linking services, one can pull together a fairly accurate digital version of oneself. Irrespective of all this progress, from my early days of internet access and even today, I am aware of the vastness of the WWW which overwhelms and underwhelms me at the same time because the web is really large and massive and gives me exposure to many brilliant people and ideas. Like the narrator emphasized in the “Hitchhikers Guide To Galaxy”, it is just unbelievably vast, huge and mind-bogglingly big. Whenever I go online, I feel like my neurons are connecting to the collective sentient consciousness of an entire species (well, those who have connectivity) residing on a little blue rock…
December 14, 2009: From the early days of computers, people have speculated that computers would be used to supplement our intelligence. Extended stores of knowledge, memories once forgotten, computational feats, and expert advice would all be at our fingertips. In the last decades, most of the work toward this dream has been in the form of trying to build artificial intelligence. By carefully encoding expert knowledge into a refined and well-pruned database, researchers strove to build a reliable assistant to help with tasks. Sadly, this effort was always thwarted by the complexity of the system and environment, too many variables and uncertainty for any small team to fully anticipate. (cue: ode to Vannevar Bush and “Memex”)
Success now is coming from an entirely unexpected source, the chaos of internet. Google (and smart search engines of tomorrow) has become our external brain, sifting through the extended stores of knowledge offered by multitudes, helping us remember what we once found, and locating advice from people who have been where we now go. For example, the other day, I was trying to describe to someone how mitochondria oddly have a separate genome, but could not recall the details. A search for [mitochondria] yielded a Wikipedia page that refreshed my memory. Later, I was wondering if train or flying between Venice and Rome was a better choice; advice arrived immediately on a search for [train flying venice rome]. Recently, I had forgotten the background of a colleague, restored again with a quick search on her name. Hundreds of times, I access le external brain, supplementing what is lost or incomplete in my own. This external brain is not programmed with knowledge, at least not in the sense we expected. There is no system of rules, no encoding of experts, no logical reasoning. There precious little understanding of information, at least not in the search itself. There is knowledge in the many voices that make up the data on the Web, but no synthesis of those voices.
Perhaps we should have expected this. Our brains, after all, are a controlled storm of competing patterns and signals, a mishmash of evolutionary agglomeration that is barely functional and easily fooled. From this chaos can come brilliance, but also superstition, illusion, and psychosis. While early studies of the brain envisioned it as a disciplined and orderly structure, deeper investigation has proved otherwise. And so it is fitting that the biggest progress on building an external brain also comes from chaos. Search engines pick out the gems in a democratic sea of competing signals, helping us find brilliance. Occasionally, our external brain leads us astray, as does our internal brain, but therein lies both the risk and beauty of building a brain on disorder. I have seen/played with future and it is not classical AI.
Climategate – Scientists Accused of Kindling Earth
As a card holding member of the species, I am the first person to agree that if the accusations of bad science are true to any infinitesimal degree, it is unforgivable and blamed scientists have to explain themselves to the world and if not cleared of misconduct, should be suspended of duties or even barred from academia and ongoing discussion. No half measures and sympathizers should bay for the bad blood. Here is my take on the respective quotes of Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intercontinental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) and US Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon in, “Top UN Scientist: What Climategate?” by Martin Andersen –
I think this [hacking of emails] is an illegal act. The only issue that has to be dealt with as far as this occurrence is concerned is to find out who is behind it. One can only surmise that those who have carried out this act have done it with the very clear intention as to influence the process in Copenhagen
Disagree. I think of the hackers as journalists and if his argument is taken seriously then we should arrest all journalists who bring out the truth and breaking stories and no, we don’t question their methods. In fact, the dirtier, the closer they are to a Pulitzer. The irony of Pachauri statement is that the greens do not want to play dirty and are afraid of getting soil in their hands. Even with surface analysis, scientists have been found out like deers in headlights. If emails reveal errors and cock-ups, accept them and remedy the situation. Stop playing the victim card. Crack the whip and bring the publications into open access for sake of transparency. Get tough.
Nothing that has come out in the public as a result of the recent email hackings has cast doubt on the basic scientific message on climate change and that message is quite clear – that climate is changing much, much faster than we realized and we human beings are the primary cause for the mess
Agree. We humans have been abusing and raping the earth to the point of no return. No matter how wrong the science, it is fairly evident and obvious that this cannot continue any longer. The planet is not a giant dustbin (hey, a nice cartoon idea) which can take uncontrolled pollution, toxic emissions and horrific beatings. Whether one takes it on faith or rationale or scare or fandom, climate change is real and there is no reason to blame all the pioneering work done by genuine scientists and use the word conspiracy and put the whole field on shaky ground. Think of it this way. If we find that the 1979th decimal of Pi was somehow computed wrong by some black sheep somewhere, we would not stop doing math and derail it from the academic curriculum. Mistakes have been made. Shit happens. True truism. But we should all see the COP15 for what it is. An opportunity to set the wrongs right and work towards the creation of a better, cleaner and energy efficient world.
Binding Emissions Cut – USA to India Shake Hand
If that is not unfair, I dont know what is. Given that per-capita income is inexplicably linked to per-capita emissions (higher income, higher pollution, duh?), it means that rich countries will get richer (but slower) and the poor countries will get poorer (and faster) if this policy or protocol or poo-poo is implemented. It seems to be more like arm-twisting to me. The irony is not the 25% or whatever arbitrary number but the gal to demand the world to forget the damage that has already been done and brandishing an air of superiority that it is the poor countries who have to take the initiative to save themselves. There is no fine being slapped because no one is asking. No technology transfer because no one is giving. No pledge to remedy the mistakes because no one is apologising. I will tell you what is binding. Rice. Ha ha.
Non-material Gifts – Dr. Seuss – Earthy Ideas
During the holiday season there is a lot of pressure to consume. Walmart becomes Wal-Santa and touts that it is now organic. Santa is one big buffoon indirectly telling us to go shopping, ho ho ho. But the truth of the matter is everybody likes presents and nobody wants to be percieved as the cynical evil green grinch (who once stole Christmas according to folklore) or frail old Scrooge (who had ghosts a visiting as per some silly book used as a metaphor too often) who have the gall to say that one hates gluttonic consumption, er Christmas. That is why lots of people are turning to “non-material gifts” which are presents that do not use up our natural resources but still make their recipients say, “whoa! awesome! tubul!”. Here are some ideas:
* Tickets to concerts, sporting events and movies
* Your own time and skills like free babysitting, gardening, cartooning, etc.
* Unique food experiences (people eat anyway, so these are “material-neutral”)
* Weekend getaways (no matter if it involves driving cars – humans are nomads)
* Crafts made from old throw-away items that nobody needs
This is what I have to say. This is a load of parrot droppings. Good luck to followers.
COP15 Rain – Capitalist Pig – Subservient Countries
Simply put, what is going to happen on and after the summit is that things will be the same and only get worse. Thank universe for entropy. The rich nations (I make it a point not to call them by misnomers of ‘developed’ or ‘civilized’ or ‘industrialized’ for many reasons least of all, decadence, immorality/brutality, laziness) who are the ones mostly responsible for the mess and 80% of the emissions even today with their meagre 20% rudderless population, are depicted as well, greedy capitalistic pigs. All this talk and noise of “climate change” even if it is made out to be a hoax thunderstorm with striking lightning, will be like raindrops on thick skinned pigs. Ergo, no effect at all. These pigs will be munching the worlds poor without a care in the world. After all, pigs apparently are the best beasts to dispose of with human bodies as this character in “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrells” confirms –
You’re always gonna have problems disposing of human bodies. They are heavy and smelly. Apparently the best thing to do is cut up a corpse into six pieces and pile it all together. And when you got your six pieces, you gotta get rid of them, because it’s no good leaving it in the deep freeze for your mum to discover, now is it? Then I hear the best thing to do is feed them to pigs. You got to starve the pigs for a few days, then the sight of a chopped-up body will look like curry to a pisshead. You gotta shave the heads of your victims, and pull the teeth out for the sake of the piggies’ digestion. You could do this afterwards, of course, but you don’t want to go sieving through pig shit, now do you? They will go through bone like butter. You need at least sixteen pigs to finish the job in one sitting, so be wary of any man who keeps a pig farm. They will go through a body that weighs 200 pounds in about eight minutes. That means that a single pig can consume two pounds of uncooked flesh every minute. Hence the expression, ‘greedy as pigs’ (and ‘capitalist pigs’).
If a pig is fed, it will feed. It is free food on a platter. What does it gotta lose? What concerns me is to see about the hand that is feeding the pig. Sadly unsurprisngly enough, it is the subservient poor countries who will have no qualms nor presence of the mind nor common sense of the future nor the grey matter of what this slavery is doing to their own nations. They will feed the pig everything, the earth, the forests, the minerals, the blood – and will do so collaboratively with one country supplying the fuel, another the timber, another to puff at the fire – without even knowing that they are but feeding, nay, disposing their fellow live humans for short-term foriegn currency reserves which at any point can lose in value. It is wrong at so many levels.
Think about it, today, if someone in the USA buys a bloody sneaker, the chain of the production is completely outsourced. Everything except the design is produced in some poor country by some underpaid malnourished chimp sweaty ugly hopeless illiterate sick bastard. The shoe might be priced at say, 100$, earning a profit of 90$ to the shoe company based in Europe which has an operating expense of 5$ tops for chaining the natives but what the poor country gets is far less than what it loses in the bargain in both monetary and resource terms. The actual cost of the shoe is not 5$ because the cost of the raw materials is heavily subsidized by nature (or externalities as economists would say) and in some cases, the government. In the end, the poor country might be getting 5$ but it is actually losing a lot more in the bargain because of depletion of resources, pollution caused, toxic waste generated and indisposed of, loss of freedom/opportunity and gross violation of human rights. By manufacturing and selling the shoe, the poor country is actually losing – a lot. It can be called a lose-lose situation if there ever was one. So, the idiots who run poor countries (democratic or communist or monarchial or theocracy or dictatorship or terrorist or military) who show so-called strides in development with skyscrapers, roads, statues, fly-overs, cars, middle-class et al. combinedly are fattening the pig with illusions of grandeur. No wonder the pig is drunk with power and has absolute disregard of an ailing planet. What fools, we humans can be. How did we get to this fucking world order? Oh wait, it was with invention of dynamite. And who pioneered that? Alfred Nobel no less. Kinda makes the peace prize hara-kiri to war mongering US presidents (can you believe there are oddly 4?) fathomable. It is a wow moment.
Size Zero Jealousy – Poverty Fashion Show – Thin In
If I kept the balloon emprty, most people would come up with a similar caption am sure. I also bet if the impoverished African lady were looking at the model, she would be thinking the exact same thing too and then some more, “Gosh! If only I was born in USA and found a fashion designer”. Well, that is women for you. Cant live with them. Cant rationalize with them. Cant survive without them. Cannot really blame them for the vanity becase society has always placed a high premium on slimness and has set, what some claim to be, impossibly high standards of glass figurine shape for girls. No matter what one says, beauty business is very big and is one of the growth engines even if the world is going to fall apart tomorrow.
Coming back to “size zero”, on hindsight (I probably dont have to say this because no one can stop a woman hell bent on becoming wafer thin or anything she sets her wonky mind to for that matter), no amount of reverse literature can stop this fad from spreading (to media controlled countries to be specific) because when you look around, it is the ill waifs (from Kate Moss to Ann Coulter to Kareena Kapoor) who are making the big bucks and horror of horrors are proclaimed by many to be role models. You dont see regular/fat women on billboards or modelling or selling lightweight laptops or power drills or starring as evil desperate housewives, crime scene investigators, bounty hunters, world peace protectors, braided archaelogical heiresses and what not, do you? I think women can make that connection. One might have no talent, not an iota whatsoever except for going for long periods of neglect, crapping and puking and yet, one can land into shit-loads of money. Thin is in. Good luck to the fat feministas. If not yet apparent, I for one support “size zero” as long as it is done through starving oneself and exercise and NOT through smoking, pills, eating disorders, fast unto sickness/death (hey, this could be good) and worst of all, bulemia. If more people dont eat, it is better for the world in general, no? I think thin people are more attractive because after all that is how nature intended the human body to be. Anyone can become fat – one has to just sit on bums all day and be indisciplined – but it takes real effort to stay thin. Think about it folks. Thin people eat less food, occupy less space, need less clothing et al. Just economics.
Mistakes in Causal Direction – GDP and Education
When you find a correlation between two phenomena, you’re tempted to conclude there’s a causal relation as well. The problem is that this causal relation – if it exists at all – can go either way. It’s a common mistake – or fraud – to choose one direction of causation and forget that the real causal link can go the other way, or both ways at the same time and space. Or not.We often think that people who like violent video games are more likely to show violent behavior because they are incited by the games to copy the violence that’s featured in these games. But can it not be that people who are more prone to violence are more fond of violent video games? We choose a direction of causation that fits with our pre-existing beliefs. Another widely shared belief is that uninformed and illiterate voters will destroy democracy, or at least diminish its value. No one seems to ask the question whether it’s not a diminished form of democracy that renders citizens apathetic and uninformed. Maybe a full or deep democracy can encourage citizens to participate and become more knowledgeable through participation. A classic example is the correlation between education levels and GDP. Do countries with higher education levels experience more economic growth because of the education levels of their citizens? Or is it that richer countries can afford to spend more on education and hence have better educated citizens? Maybe both. Or perhaps it is just old boy Pareto Law. Or simply, random twist of fate.
Bakes your noodles, no? These are chicken-egg problems and hence, solvable.
Manmohan Singh NRI Call – Return Home
Real-time Search – Query People – Hybridosphere
To illustrate it more clearly, let us have a peek into what Collecta (a self-proclaimed ‘real-time search engine’) is doing. It primarily scours for blogs, tweets, comments and media from the social media landscape and exposes a simple search box on top of the index with scrolling results on every tick of time. While Collecta still does not crawl other activity streams like Delicious, Evernote, Hooeey, Digg etc. (due to lack of API or traction or both), very quickly, I was inundated by opinions of people talking about something that I was interested in knowing although it is a very simple keyword play using data stream algorithms is what I thought was happening in the background. In other words, I was firing a query and figuratively, getting people and their noisy thoughts, not documents per-se, as results. I was pretty amused (even UI is cute) but not impressed. Quite. There should be a semantic-people-web out there[2]. As for object-centric web (or 3.0 or 4.0) of the future, someone has to invent it but there are some chains of thought of what will searching on that web look like. I have some ideas too (hey, they’re free) but let us not get ahead of ourselves and stick to the real-time search topic and come back to the Battelle article, shall we? Till then, here are some choice quotes from article(s) and available commentary. It is at best incomplete because, a lot of debate must have ensued, ideas spawned, hundreds of blog posts (and tweets and comments) written yada yada yada in the downstream but we will never know about ALL even if citations and trackbacks are supposed to be transitive. If B mentions A and C mentions B, then A should carry over to C (or the commentary should attach to A). This is what I want to work on using the a multitude of available APIs (ThoughtReactions seems to be a good name for such an endeavour, no?) but that is a project for the proverbial another day which never ever seems to dawn. Am rattling again. Out with the commentary…
Google was the ultimate interface for stuff that had already been said – a while ago. When you queried Google, you got the popular wisdom – but only after it was uttered, edited into HTML format, published on the web, and then crawled and stored by Google’s technology. It’s inarguable that the web is shifting into a new time axis. Blogging was the first real indication of this. Technorati tried to be the search engine for the “live web” but failed[1]. Twitter can succeed because it is quickly gaining critical mass as a conversation hub. But there is ambient data more broadly, in particular as described by John Markoff’s article (posted here). All of us are creating fountains of ambient data, from our phones, our web surfing, our offline purchasing, our interactions with tollbooths, you name it. Combine that ambient data (the imprint we leave on the digital world from our actions) with declarative data (what we proactively say we are doing right now) and you’ve got a major, delicious, wonderful, massive search problem, er, opportunity.
Let’s say you are in the market to buy something – anything. You get a list of top pages for “Canon EOS”, and you are off on a major research project. Imagine a service that feels just like Google, but instead of gathering static-web results, it gathers live-web results – what people are saying, right now about “Canon EOS”? And/or, you could post your query to that engine, and you could get real-time results that were created – by other humans – directly in response to you? Add in your social graph (what your friends, and your friend’s friends are saying), far more sophisticated algorithms a critical mass of data – and those results could be truly game changing. OneRiot just launched and I believe we’re taking a piece of the problem by finding the pulse of the web. The content people are talking about today by having over 2 million people share their activity data processing it in real-time and create the first real-time index. The web as it is today, now, tackling news first followed by videos and products next. And therefore, each pulse.
How much journalism these days is spotting patterns from the real-time web? How much is mining the static web? There is another form of journalism, which involves spending time in the real world, but it may be falling out of fashion. I’m not sure that there’s a huge great wobbly lump of wondermoney sitting at the end of the real-time web search rainbow. And if there is, I wonder if it’s much bigger than the one sitting a day further down the line, where the massive outpouring of us auto-digitising hominids has been filtered by the mechanisms we have, more or less, in place now. Google’s big problem isn’t that it can’t be Google a day earlier, it’s that it can’t be cleverer about imparting meaning to what it filters. For now, and until AI gets a lot better, the new worth of the Web is how we humans organise, rank and connect it. The good stuff takes time and thought, and so far nobody’s built an XML-compliant thought accelerator – Rupert Goodwins
Do you think live feeds be treated similar to how newswires were 30 years ago – considered a pay-for service? You’ve described how Twitter could start making money (via its search) and made me think of the possibility of Google buying Twitter. How different from Twitter should Google’s indexing of Twitter be? Their blog search is dismal because they’re searching good with junk. Look at those Twitter results, I am wondering exactly what utility they actually bring? I mean what value to the user? To be frank I care less what my friends think about the Canon EOS than what the opinions of professional photographers. In that regard there need to some method for improving authority. My social graph is my social graph – it’s of dubious value to me for making buying decisions. All the same, great post as it continues to generate lots of discussion in our office. The point you raise about what this feels like to users is especially near to me – it’s one thing to bring back real time results, and another thing entirely to present them in dynamic, useful ways.
I’m not all that concerned about what twit Twittered what in the last 24 hours, and I think that most of the people that do are twits. For instance, if I was researching a camera or a car, I’d be interested in the best stuff written about it in the last year or so, not in the last five minutes. Sure, a public relations flack might want to keep track of bad things people say on Twitter so they can have their lawyers send them nastygrams, but for ordinary people, it’s just a waste of time. Entertaining maybe, but a waste of time. Right on. It is not just real-time search, there’s a lot more that can cash in on this (and provide great user experience in the process). There will also be a goodly sum of what Rupert calls “wondermoney” racing at lightspeed toward the bank account of the company that will best provide the means to protect privacy of hundreds of millions who have absolutely no need nor any desire to see the dots of their every action and comment connected and delivered to “the matrix”.
This is definitely the next big thing in search. Your articulation of it is perfect. I say this, because I experienced this same thing over the last several weeks when I created a new Twitter account for our new products and wanted to track what people are saying. A quick Twitter search was the answer and a few replies later I had some conversations going and new followers as well. The real-time web will far outweigh the benefits of the archived web, atleast for certain types of information. Journalism was the original search engine, albeit with a rather baroque query interface. It tends to adopt most efficient use of people and technology to produce good data, being a notoriously Darwinist entity, and it’s quite good at adapting quickly – hasn’t taken long for blogs to make their mark. It’s a good thing to track if you want to sniff out utility on the Web – after all, journalism is the first draft of history.
Marketers would love that ambient data but that is a backwards approach to search. I don’t see the usefulness or appetite for people to query about what their friends are doing – especially when its already being delivered to them. You really need to see what’s going on in FriendFeed more to grok the real time nature of the web. Look at my realtime feed here for just a small taste – that’s 4,800 hand-picked people being displayed in real-time here. So, I think evolution is the wrong word. Perhaps the right word is “rediscovery”, or “mass public revelation” or “adoption” or something like that. The future was here 15 to 50 years ago. It just wasn’t (to quote the popular phrase) evenly distributed. So maybe all you’re saying is that this particular aspect of search, i.e. routing and filtering, or SDI, or whatever we may call it, is finally “growing” or “spreading”. But “growing” != “evolving”. But search is not evolving; what you are speaking of already exists and has existed.
We are talking about “text filtering” which sounds exactly like an idea that has been around for 40+ years. Here is a description of the problem from http://trec.nist.gov/pubs/trec11/papers/OVER.FILTERING.pdf – a text filtering system sifts through a stream of incoming information to find documents relevant to a set of user needs represented by profiles. Unlike the traditional search query, user profiles are persistent, and tend to reflect a long term information need. With user feedback, the system can learn a better profile, and improve its performance over time. The TREC filtering track tries to simulate on-line time-critical text filtering applications, where the value of a document decays rapidly with time. This means that potentially relevant documents must be presented immediately to the user. There is no time to accumulate and rank a set of documents. Evaluation is based only on the quality of the retrieved set. Filtering differs from search in that documents arrive sequentially over time. This overview paper was from 2002, but the TREC track itself goes back to the 90s and the idea goes back even further. In fact, now that I think of it, I remember talking with a friend at Radio Free Europe (anyone else remember that?) in Prague back in 1995, and he was describing a newswire system that they had, that did this online, real-time filtering. So maybe there’s a shift from static to real-time search in the public, consumer web. But there have been systems (and research) around in other circles that have been doing this for a while.
You may note that the link refers to a machine called ‘Memex’, Vannevar Bush (one of the first visionaries of “automated” information storage and retrieval schemes) wrote about decades before Luhn wrote about SDI. But you could go back a couple millenia, too – for example: the ancient Greeks argued whether words were real or ideal, representations or hoaxes for “actual observation” (and such disputation persisted throughout the Middle Ages [Occam’s Razor] to this very day [one of most renowned philosophers of 20th Century – Ludwig Wittgenstein – probably immensely influenced the AI community without their even being “aware” of it). The issue that such “gizmos” such as SDI and/or AI in general cannot deal with is that the world keeps changing: change is the only constant. Everything is in flux – always! As it always has been, no? The ideas and technology for all search were around way before Alta Vista popularized them, and Google.
[1] Technorati is a cautionary tale but then, most blog search engines (Technorati, Icerocket, Tailrank) have not made an impact because value of pure play search is in doubt. No one wants to go to a search box when there are the triumvirate of Google, Wikipedia and Browser Search Bar. Even Google is neglecting the area (cue: Google Blog Search sucks). Sad really because I feel that blogs empowered the first and therefore, the impressionable pioneering wave of citizen journalism and democratization of media phenomenon (Podcasts, YouTube, Seesmic, Qik etc. followed) that is a promising and enticing field which got washed away while still raw by Twitter (which can still be seen as lazy blogging if one is really looking hard) and the search companies the statusosphere spawned (OneRiot, Topsy, Collecta, Scoopler, TweetMeme). Maybe it is the ‘path of least resistance’ or ‘journalism is not for everybody’ at play here or just that something might be missing like say, attention data that can today be sucked from various places (eg. “implicit web”). Some blogosphere companies still exist and have survived, nay, thrived because they were smart to change their technology, business and operational model like Sphere (where I worked) and another promising company, Twingly (working on ideas such as ‘Channels’ and integrating with rest of mainstream Web 2.0). Am not a betting person but if life depended on it, I predict a revenge of the hybridosphere (blogs plus history, status and trails) when the Twitter fad cools down as well, just another phase of tripe (Facebook has 40 times more updates). We are already seeing it because Twitter is becoming yet another ego-URL store and copy-cat social network where it is becoming increasingly difficult to seperate the genuine article from the millions of pretenders, spammers and worst, marketeers.
[2] Between extremes of organized mainstream professional media to unstructured freestyle frivolous noise of jibber-jabber, there is a small, yet significant band of people-centric web which offers a truly multi-opinionated clairvoyance to the world. An analogy is ye faithful human eye which can only see a very small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Sure, it would be nice to be able to see the ultraviolent and infrared frequencies but the most interesting things happen in the visible band because it is so colourful and vibrant. There has to be an evolutionary benefit that the eye has settled to its current state. Getting out of the metaphor, this narrow band of semi-professional passionate implicit-explicit human generated content (you call it ‘hybridosphere’ if you like), if captured and processed intelligently, can be made to do some very magical and wonderful things (search, direct and indirect such as ‘related articles’, is just one of the many applications that can be built on top of this foundation and as proof look at crowd powered news site Insttant and sentiment analysis companies like Clara and Infegy) to all stakeholders but most of all, to the general public who just want to see the web as a collective of nice people living harmoniously in a wee global village free from shackles of big media opening up a world of discovery from all parts of our little blue marble in the sky. It is a matter of time and effort (luck is to work on RSSCloud, ThoughtReactions, Histosphere[3] and other neologisms) when we will see such Webfountain’ish hybrid companies (data mix of blogs, status, history, conversation, bookmarks, attention, trails, media, objects etc.) claiming their rightful place in Web 2.0 (or 3.0 or 4.0) pecking order, bringing to the fore badly needed innovation to excavate the people-centric web diamond mine. In my vision, searching in such a world looks figuratively like this…
This is inspired by a scene in “The Time Machine” (2002) where the protagonist Alexander encounters the Vox System in the early 21st century. The virtual assistant (played by Orlando Jones), is seen on a series of glass fibre screens offering to help the hero using a “photonic memory core” linked to every database in the world effectively making it into a compendium of all human knowledge. Since this scene must have been thoroughly researched, it is safe to rip it and suffice to say that an immersive search experience is one where the searcher is virtually forwarded to experts in the area who might have the answer he/she seeks. [edit: 20091214] Apparently, such a thing has been pondered before. Obvious really. It is Battelle again writing for BingTweets Blog, “Decisions are Never Easy – So Far. Part-3” –
Normally a 30 minute conversation is a whole lot better for any kind of complex question. What is it about a conversation? Why can we, in 30 minutes or less, boil down what otherwise might be a multi-day quest into an answer that addresses nearly all our concerns? And what might that process teach us about what the Web lacks today and might bring us tomorrow? The answer is at once simple and maddenly complex. Our ability to communicate using language is the result of millions of years of physical and cultural evolution, capped off by 15-25 years of personal childhood and early adult experience. But it comes so naturally, we forget how extraordinary this simple act really is. I once asked Larry Page of Google, what his dream search engine looked like. His answer: Computer from Star Trek – an omnipresent, all knowing machine with which you could converse. We’re a long way from that – and when we do get there, we’re bound to arrive a with a fair amount of trepidation – after all, every major summer blockbuster seems to burst with the bad narrative of machines that out-think humans (Terminator, Battlestar Galactica, 2001 Space Odyssey, Matrix, I Robot… you get the picture).
Allow me to wax a bit philosophical. While the search and Internet industry focus almost exclusively on leveraging technology to get to better answers, we might take another approach. Perhaps instead of scaling machines to the point of where they can have a “human” conversation with us (a la Turing), perhaps instead (or, as well), we might leverage machines to help connect us to just the right human with whom we might have that conversation? Let me go back to my classic car question to explain – and this will take something of a leap of faith, in that it will require we, as a collective culture, adapt to the web platform as a place where we’re perfectly comfortable having conversations with complete strangers. Imagine I have at my fingertips a service, that allows me to ask a question about which classic car to buy and how, and that engine instantly connects me to an expert – or a range of experts that can be filtered by critieria I and others can choose (collective intelligence and feedback loops are integrated, naturally). Imagine Mahalo crossed with Aardvark and Squidoo, at Google and Facebook scale.
An ‘expert’ of course is still undefined and the jury is still out on what such an entity constitutes. Hey! I never said I have all the answers. Besides, aren’t things like call centres, web site with live chat etc. already handle this rant of human-on-line? and communication is always a problem. So, good luck with that. Live long and prosper.
[3] Let us talk about histosphere. The concept is fairly simple. There are several companies (Hooeey, Google, Infoaxe, Thumbstrips, WebMynd, Iterasi, Timelope, Cluztr, Wowd, Nebulus etc.) that are collecting the browsing history of users mainly through the mechanism of toolbars. On an individual basis, ‘web memory’ has utility and so, users can be convinced that it is a good tool to have and that it is a good idea to share the surf logs to the public at large not very unlike the case made for social bookmarking. This collective social history (also count Opera Mini logs whose web proxy server is collecting 500Million URLs per-day and Mozilla Weave which will have similar numbers soon) is what I call the ‘histosphere’ (a parallel word being the blogosphere and the criminally underexploited, bookmarkosphere). A simple theory is that the histosphere is a proper superset of blogosphere and bookmarkosphere and hence it is as useful, if not more so, than both combined. There is a trickle effect at play here. Not all history gets bookmarked and not all bookmarks get blogged. So, the narrow band we talked about above is really narrow but as any signal processing engineer would vouch, we should also count the haze or radiation to make sense of the quasar. Therefore, the same business and technology models of blogosphere (example, Sphere) and bookmarkosphere (example, Digg) can be replicated for the histosphere but given the noisy nature of surf logs, one should apply filters (like ‘engagement metrics’) and use properties of attention data (like ‘observer neutrality’) to deliver better experiences. Google is already trying to do this if one is logged in to get personalized search results but they suck in one-off rare cases they are visible. A use-case is to combine web memory with the side-effect of identity provided by toolbars to customize the whole web experience. Everywhere you go, the web memory follows sifting through the cacophony. For example, if I am using Infoaxe and go to NYT or WSJ, the publishers will detect that it is me@infoaxe and deliver relevant content (and also ads, sic). Whichever search engine (reference or blog or real-time) loads history (and other streams) onto its cart will no doubt upset the shifting gravy train. Go Hybridosphere!
Joy of Giving – Ample Supply of Goodness – Banyan
Though there is a lot of suffering, there are also a large number of people and institutes and corporates doing their best to alleviate it. Goodness is not in short supply. Buddha said this in his sermon on charity, “Hard it is to understand: by giving away our food, we get more strength; by bestowing clothing on others, we gain more beauty; by donating abodes of purity and truth, we gain greate treasures; give till it hurts.” Most other religions and prophets have preached the same. In a country such as India where more than half of the population lives on less than 20-rupees daily (or 50c, hey, it is far less than international yardstick of poverty at 2$/day, interesting), it is the responsibility of the privileged fellow citizens to change the skewed balance between the haves and have-nots. Basic needs like food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, education, water, electricity that several of us take for granted are even today a struggle for several. Fortunately, the conscience of the common man is awake and alive. So are corporate hearts and dedication of NGOs.
Sounds too much of an advertisment but well, thank goodness that there is some good still left although I opine that poor are poor because they are suggestable and keep electing criminals time after time after time who are responsible for this mess which is a serious problem than is acknowledged. Maybe they deserve to suffer.
Afghanistan Surge – 2011 Exit – Economist Cartoon
Fish Monger and PETA Environmentalist
True story. I am not making this up. Or maybe I am. A little exaggeration has not hurt anybody and has always helped in getting the point through. So, for all you PETA and environmentalists morons out there, beware with whom you pick your battles with. Go fight the mega fishing/export corporations if you dare and leave the small business peope alone. If they don’t beat you up and deservedly so, they will soon be protected as under the “safety of social entrepreneurs act” underway anyway.
Food Price Inflation – WPI at 15.58% – Subsidy PDS
Food prices kept their upward trend hitting the common man hard. Food inflation rose to 15.58% for the second week of November with potato prices rising by 111% As compared to last year the prices of pulses were up by 35.60%, wheat by 12.53%, cereals by 13.04% and rice by 11.89%. Also prices of vegetables moved up by 11.96%, onions by 27.33%, fruits by 10.97% and milk by 11.36%. On a weekly basis, products which saw a rise in their prices are urad and poultry chicken (15% each), eggs (8%), moong (6%), arhar (5%), fruits and vegetables (3%) and milk and wheat (1% each). However, the prices of barley (2%) declined. The increase in food prices is due to shortages caused partly by a weak monsoon and partly by floods in some parts of the country. Said Mr Trehan and Mrs Mathur respectively –
In a country where even a simple vegetable like potato has become so expensive, how can one expect to have three meals a day. Survival has become really tough. How frugal can one become?
One has to think twice even for grocery shopping. Everything has become out of reach. Be it milk, vegetables or pulses. And worst, public transport has also gone so expensive. How can we honestly manage?
Inflation for all commodities more than doubled to 1.34% for the month of October from 0.50% in September due to costlier minerals and fuels, as per data released earlier. The finance minister, Pranab Mukherjee, said on Thursday that government is very deeply concerned about rising prices and will take all fiscal and monetary measures to contain it. Arjun Sengupta in his “Fair Food Deal for All” in DC on 30-November-2009 comments that it is high time that the government initiates a universal public distribution system (PDS) covering at least the essential commodities because the bulk of the population, about 70%, remains poor with their dire struggle for minimal livelihood –
About 350-million people remain below poverty line (BPL). The prices of essential commodities have been rising at an unprecedented rate. Not only foodgrains but vegetables like onions and potatoes are becoming costlier day by day. These affect all Indians but for the poor they are devastating as all their meagre incomes get exhausted, not meeting even a portion of the necessities. Prices of these products are no doubt largely due to shortfall in production but there are clear signs of market cornering, hoarding and price fixing. It is, however, very difficult to control speculatory tendencies by physical measures because the players are too many in the country and not just big traders and producers, even the common rehriwalla is hoarding. Unless those expectations are dampened they cannot bring down the speculation. The only way to do that is to increase supplies, if not through temporary production increase measures, then through additional imports.
To mitigate this problem, the universal PDS would be the first important step beginning with the BPL population by supplying them with the essential commodities at cheap and affordable prices. If PDS is targeted to a limited BPL population it may also be possible to increase their supplies through market purchase of these products and sell them at subsidised prices. This would push up the open market prices somewhat further. But targeted PDS can be sustained if the government is willing to subsidise the difference between market price and issue price of commodities. Hopefully increased prices, supported by planned increase in production incentives, will raise output in a short period reducing the supplies bottleneck. But in the immediate future, the government has to be ready to bear the cost of maintaining the PDS. However, the most important requirement is organisation of the system. That cannot be achieved by market incentives or subsidies. The government has to build up a huge and efficient structure of distribution throughout the country. It has to procure, purchase or import products and reach them to different destinations of the PDS. This can be done only with the help of state governments, first to identify the BPL beneficiaries and then to have fair-price shops supply the products efficiently. National Agricultural Cooperative Marketing Federation of India Limited (NACMFoI) or similar organisations can be created for vegetable and other such products. They should build up storages and have contract farming both at home and abroad. The time has now come for all kinds of out-of-the-box thinking to meet a serious problem of economic management in the country. Indian development, if it has to follow an inclusive path, must reinvent itself so that the poor develop an equal stake in our growth process.
Well, I agree in moral principle to Dr Sengupta (a Member of Parliament and former Economic Adviser to assassinated-good-riddance Prime Minister Indira Gandhi) but does this universal PDS not sound too communist? Why should the poor be further subsidized when already farmer markets, ration shops and pink/white cards etc. exist? Are not the high prices a result of supply-demand and greed (read, free-market capitalism) and therefore, market-based solutions are needed? Let missionaries, NGOs, social enterprises and fortune-at-BoP marketing gurus deal with solving something tangible like hunger for a change other than human rights, empowerment or whatever cause. Oh wait, they tried. And failed. And chickened out.
Do You Drink Milk – Kid Home Theatre
Story goes that my nephew absolutely hated milk and any of its sidekicks like yogurt, buttermilk and horrors, even ice-cream. As any parents would do, they would tell him that drinking milk would make him strong and excel in sports and studies. But this was of no avail because both parents were not smart nor athletic at all. The kid just could not make the connection. One day, an LPG cylinder guy came to the house and he was quite simply the strongest guy the kid has ever seen because he was moving the cylinders like toys. Visibly impressed, the kid hounded the worker and finally mustered the courage to ask him, “Uncle, do you drink milk?”. The guy was bemused and not knowing what to say, looked around only to find us as surprised as him, if not more so. Finally, he answered in the affirmative. The kid immediately ran to the mother and asked for milk and has never complained of it in the many years since. Mothers can be great inventors of necessitating milk but most of the times, I suppose, kids are greater discoverers of positive effects of milk.
Germs are Good – Politicians Take Credit – No Shit
Back to the study (must have been publicly funded paying for several academic gits for quite a few years) published in Nature magazine, the hypothesis developed IMHO is just old wine in a new bottle. One has to just look at much of the 3rd world to see that exposure to germs, bacteria, viruses and just about any snotty nosed cellular organisms are good in the long run to improve disease resistance and overall individual health. Consider poster woman for poverty and corruption, India for example. As people get poorer, their health seems to become more robust. I have never seen a poor guy who is bald to mention something that I suffer from. They just happen to die young and quick (with liver problems in the case of men and malnutrition and neglect in the case of women but let us not get into that). I have not heard any of the maids and drivers ever having a heart attack or inflicted with diabetes or down with cancer or taking sick leaves. Makes you wonder if there is a correlation but that should not be an excuse (as it is made out to be) for shabby living. As the little birdie, in this case, Jairam Ramesh says, “India cities are the dirtiest cities of the world. If there is a Nobel prize for dirt and filth, India will win it, no doubt”, maybe, uncleanliness might still have its benefits and bring pride to a country which after all beat its chest on poverty porn, er, “Slumdog Millionaire”. Onto the second article, here are some statistics and eye watering consolidations…
In slum areas, where more than half of Mumbai lives, an average 81 people share a single toilet. In some places it rises to an eye-watering 273 according to local municipal authority figures. Unsurprisingly, it is still common to see people squatting by roads and railway tracks or along the coast, openly defecating in where some of the world’s richest people live. The UN estimates 55% Indians or 600-million shameless undignified brownies still defecate outside, more than 60 years after the scrupulously clean independence leader Mahatma Gandhi first talked of the responsible disposal of human waste. India has to improve sanitation, to control the spread of diseases like diarrhoea, which UNICEF says kills 1,000 Indian children aged under five every day. Extrapolating it to the the entire 3rd world, the numbers are staggering and beyond belief. Lots of humans still live like animals.
Public toilet provision faces the same problem affecting housing, water and other basic services: supply cannot keep up with demand as India’s population explodes. A UN Human Development Report 2009, published earlier this month, points out that even where public toilets exist, most have no running water, drainage or electricity, making them unhygienic and unusable. Embarrassment means women and girls often wait all day until it is dark to go to the toilet, increasing their chances of infections and exposing them to violence or even snake bites as they seek out remote places. Poor sanitation and the illnesses it causes cost the Indian economy 12-billion rupees (255-million USD) a year, according to health ministry and according to the tourism industry, irrevocably tarnishes the image although some argues that does add charm and allure to India spun as open-air toilets.
Every year over a third of a million Indian kids below five die, all because of a lack of adequate disposal of human waste which is one of the most toxic in developing countries. Sanitation is a public good. The availability of public goods – just like private goods – depends on the supply as well as the demand. It can be argued that the demand for sanitation is low. People are content to just go along with the lack of sanitation. And then there is the problem of supply. Public funds are allocated based on what those who control the public purse consider to be high priority. Providing public toilets is not a priority. If the population valued a clean environment, they would have had it – both through private actions and through their voting for those who spend public money on public sanitation. The public does not demand it and the politicians don’t care to provide it. Perhaps they deserve to be living like this if at all a case has to be made for their existence, nay, mere survival.
Speaking of septic tanks and poops, some nut over at Acorn argues that “Fixing Drains will Help Counter Terrorism”. Finally, I dont know what makes Isaac Asimov an authority on human dignity, democracy and population growth when he was obsessed with replacing humans with robots but all the same, in conversation wth Bill Moyers (captured in “World of Ideas”, 1989), he says that over-crowding is not conducive to human dignity using a bathroom metaphor. The same way democracy cannot survive over-population, human dignity cannot survive it and convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people into the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears. The more people, less the individuals.
Unbearably Sad Reality of India – 26/11 Aftermath
As per the conjecture that good bits can be buried in a matchbox (with apologies to Christopher Hitchens), here are a few selected quotes from the piece…
In 1947, India had great promise. It could have become at least a second world economy (per-capita $10,000) and – given its huge population of over a billion – it could have been a formidable economic force. As someone sadly noted, “of all sad words of tongue or pen, ‘it could have been’ are the saddest of all”. Where’s India actually? China and the US are the worlds “two leading powers,” wrote our favourite NYT columnist Thomas L Friedman. How much more blatantly obvious can it be that India does not bat in the big league when even Friedman figures it out. How irrelevant is India? The US president in a speech delivered recently in Tokyo on US relations in Asia did not even mention India. Sometime ago, Bill Clinton had wanted to make a quick stop in India on his way to visit China. The Chinese told him that he need not bother coming to China if he was going to stop however briefly in India. When you come to China, come to China only, they told him. Clinton said, yessiree. A little later came Clinton’s visit to India. He decided that he will stop by Pakistan on his way back from India. India begged him to not do so. India begged, not demanded. He told India to shove it and stopped in Pakistan. India has to suffer indignities because it is unbearably poor.
India is poor because its policies suck. India has bad policies because it got bad leaders right from the start. One cannot fault small countries such as say, Burundi or Zambia, for not being a world power. They just don’t have the population, the human capital, the size or the natural resources for that. No one expects small marginal countries to be of any consequence. But India had (almost) all the necessary components for becoming a nation of some consequence in a few decades after independence. What it did not have was enlightened leadership. Are those leaders alone to blame? Actually no. Leadership is largely endogenous and reflects the nature of the population. The ultimate cause of poverty of any large group is the group itself. India’s leaders are ensuring that it continues to be an irrelevant third-world country by keeping it poor and condemning hundreds of millions of Indians to lives of extreme deprivation and premature deaths.
India is so weak externally that even a failed tinpot Islamic dictatorship can cause immense harm to India. Another failed Islamic state – one which India saved from being butchered further by its Islamic brother and helped it gain independence – routinely sponsors terrorism in India and is engineering a demographic change in India’s eastern states. India responds with weak protests. India is so weak internally that its citizens die by the hundreds each year from Islamic terrorism and all it can do is to run to the US and complain that Pakistan is being bad to India. India whines and asks the US to declare Pakistan a state that supports terrorism. The US, in response, declares Pakistan to be a frontline ally of the USA “war on terror.” That’s not a slap on the face of India. That’s a steel-toed military boot shoved deep in the head. India has been reduced to a rather pathetic state that its prime minister feels grateful for the little attention that the US administration magnanimously throws his way. He, of all people, should know because the family he serves so loyally (the Nehrus) is the one that has reduced India to this reality.
Ever get that old feeling that you heard it all before? Well, that is what I feel. Adios.
Public Sector Units – Disinvestment Offer
Buzzwords in Journal Publications
Authorized Graffiti Paintings on Bangalore Walls
I can only imagine what the future directions to lost tourists would be. “Go left on the painting that is about grief and suffering inviting the viewer to contemplate the evanescence of life speaking to the horror of ones own mortality and from there, take first right to the rather safe, predigested, bucolic genre scenes depicting the crass shallow values of the human condition”. While the former could be a banian advertisement and latter, a cinema poster, a tourist will be able to find the address in question and empty his bladder on the avant garde piece of a hole in the ground.
Thoughtcrafts Sriks6711 
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