Posts filed under ‘Research’
Sleep Cleanses Toxins, Gunk, Trash in Brains
Finally we have it folks. After millenia of having a crack at the mystery, with thousands of crackpot theories in vogue and spending exponentially more think-time and dollars on the research, theory, practicals and experiments on man, fish, insect and beast, 13 scientists of a melting-pot persuasion representing atleast 5 continents in their origins based in Rochester have some semblance of a partial explanation as to the function that sleep of the night-cap kind serves. Here is “Sleep Drives Metabolite Clearance from the Adult Brain”, Lulu Xie, Hongyi Kang, Qiwu Xu, Michael J. Chen, Yonghong Liao, Meenakshisundaram Thiyagarajan, John O’Donnell, Daniel J. Christensen, Charles Nicholson, Jeffrey J. Iliff, Takahiro Takano, Rashid Deane, and Maiken Nedergaard, Science, 18 October 2013: 342 (6156), 373-377. DOI:10.1126/science.1241224] –
The conservation of sleep across all animal species suggests that sleep serves a vital function. We here report that sleep has a critical function in ensuring metabolic homeostasis. Using real-time assessments of tetramethylammonium diffusion and two-photon imaging in live mice, we show that natural sleep or anesthesia are associated with a 60% increase in the interstitial space, resulting in a striking increase in convective exchange of cerebrospinal fluid with interstitial fluid. In turn, convective fluxes of interstitial fluid increased the rate of β-amyloid clearance during sleep. Thus, the restorative function of sleep may be a consequence of the enhanced removal of potentially neurotoxic waste products that accumulate in the awake central nervous system.
Duh, I say. Is it huh, I hear you say? From a mish-mash of coverage of this seminal development and dissemination in various places (and counting) like NPR, Science Blog, Associated Press, Times of India and Zee News, allow me to plainspeak. Essentially, brains sweep hemselves clean of toxins during sleep. In mice, their brain cells shrink, allowing cerebrospinal fluid to flow easily around them. The fluid can then clear away toxins. The study reveals brain takes out the trash while we sleep in findings that give fresh meaning to the old adage that a good night’s sleep clears the mind for sleep gets rid of gunk that builds up while we’re awake which while explaining the function of sleep, may also provide new clues to treat Alzheimer’s disease and other disorders. These waste products included amyloid beta, a protein that when accumulated is a driver of Alzheimer’s disease. In order to help remove the waste, cerebral spinal fluid is pumped through brain tissue. The process is sped along during sleep because the brain’s cells shrink by about 60 percent, allowing the fluid to move faster and more freely through the brain. The whole operation takes place in what researchers call the glymphatic system, which appears to be nearly 10 times more active during sleep than while awake. The body does this sweeping only during sleep and not continuously during wakefulness for the sake of energy efficiency and performance in day activities.
I would not be much of a self-acclaimed scientist and card-carrying blogger if I did not put my spin on it now, would I? We may not have hundreds of mice lying about to dissect their brains about and 2-photon microscopes in the garage but this study appeals to us because this ‘cleaning trash’ theory is something we all innately have internalized to explain, if only to ourselves, why nature has made sleep mandatory that takes up roughly half of our lives (counting the sleep from when we are young and senile which is a lot). Life is short and then we have to sleep. Doh! Not to drill holes but there is a lot more to be explained about sleep, especially in humans who also sleep recreationally with naps, siestas, kunukus etc. and under stress when we are ill, hit on the head etc. What happens and what is the purpose of sleep in these situations? Seriousness apart, that sleep cleanses our brains of toxins makes one wonder about death which is but indefinite sleep. It seems to me that death is that one last big cleanse. It is nature cleansing the planet of our toxic insignificant existence in this mortal coil. Sweet dreams, bitter visions, sour nightmares et al.
Real Truth Behind Arab Spring – Dissected
Finally, someone did some true work and dissected the phenomenon of the so-called “Arab Spring”. Here is Hernando de Soto Polar (President of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy at Lima in Peru, and author of ‘The Mystery of Capital’) op-ed piece in Deccan Chronicle today by arrangement with the Spectator – The real truth behind the Arab Spring | Deccan Chronicle
Effectively, it boils down to just one thing – the uprising is not for democracy nor liberty nor rights but the fundamental human need to make a decent living without interference of corruption – something that even the developed world with its free-slinging yeehaw free-market and capitalism guns in their holsters and tanks cannot deliver to people without old-money and influence.
I suppose sad sods collectively called humanity could not care less about the type of government or religion or police or any other entity that affects their daily life as long as they can simply go about making a living without getting too much hassled along the way. If a dictator or puppet-president can ensure this, people will welcomingly tolerate it but even when a democratically elected government with fair voting (if there is indeed such a thing) does not deliver on this basic amenity, people will revolt. As simple as clean water – scratch that, clean water apparently is hard to get for billions of people. As simple as clean air – scratch that, clean air apparently is hard to get for billions of people. As simple as clean earth – scratch that… you get the drift. Just about anything is complicated if it is not handed down.
Now it leaves the small question why people in other parts of developing world like India, Bangladesh, Pakistan etc. where they have it much worse than Arabia do not revolt. Elementary my dear websons, these are not people but sheeple who have given up all hope and merely exist and survive. Sorry to digress.
Google+ Going Circles
Some earthlings too have pondered about the future of Google+ here and here.
80:20 Communications Golden Ratio – EMail Proof
Hypothesis:
Now it may be the case that I have been away from email research for a while with my finger-in-pie projects of Soylent, MIT Media Labs’ Social Network Fragments and IBM Remail gotten archived serving as footnotes in information sciences research but we made a starkling discovery half a decade back that email is the most sticky social network of all and 80:20 (or Pareto Law or Rich-get-Richer or Power Log or Long Tail Graph etc.) is the golden ratio for communication patterns in any circumstance. Ergo, as a quick thought experiment, if you take all your contacts and conversations in your inbox and chart them by age and activity, it will be a classic long tail. Not only do you communicate with 20% people for 80% of the time but the 80% of the activity will happen in the first 20% timeline of the relationship. A corollary was that if you broadcast something, 80% of it gets lost in the ether and this is what I will put to the test today for your greymatter exercise pleasure.
Experiment:
I am not a people person but having missed the chance to experiment in Amazon Web Services Cloud Computing Event in Bangalore, I thought I’d gather data in the NASSCOM Product Conclave and Expo 2010. Oh, the things I do in the name of research. I managed to gather 31 visiting cards (this has to be outmoded BTW for green and convenience reasons – where are vCards, BlueTooth, semacodes, Bump, digital IDs, card scanners in smartphones et al.) and the next day while memory is still fresh, broadcasted an LoL-inducing cute long mail saying hello and spouting philosophy. Note that the sample was quite diverse with some whom I interacted with deeply to some whom I had lunch/coffee and some from whom I got a visiting card without making any verbal contact whatsoever. All bases covered.
Results and Conclusion:
Enough talk. Let us look at a snapshot of a spreadsheet with a pie-chart –
I guess the data speaks for itself. (Silence + Bounce = 25) is 80% and any scientist would be happy to be proven right and plug ‘I told you so’ but am not really religious err… I mean as a real scientist (who is often seen as a heretic in the circles), I take great thrill in being proven wrong in the best interests of progress. Alas, life has been dull! I salute thee who replied back, pursued the line of inquiry, called up, glued on LinkedIn etc. who make up the 20% because without them, there would be no 80% split now, would it? Yin and Yang. As a parting trivia, funny/serious thing is that those who responded did it 80% by email as mode of communication. No wonder Facebook seems to be getting into email as per chirps on the interwebs.
Le Why?
The quick answer to this, I don’t know nor do I have the skills/education to pursue this other than half-baked observational theories which are dime a dozen. Maybe, someone will pick this up and explore but for that to happen, more data is needed and more people should report back broadcast/response ratios in their email.
State of Social Networking in India – ADD Version
Facebook is #1 by a thin margin over Orkut which while at #2 is said to be slowly dying. I second (pun intended and proud of wordplay) the conclusion because web services are like sharks: if they are stagnant, they drown. Another key observation is Twitter on steroids jetpack growing by leaps and bounds.
PS: Rankings based on July YoY growth and unique visitors of ages 15 and up.
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
Greed Begets Capitalism Begets Scams, Corruption
In 1776, Adam Smith’s famous and still widely quoted passage in the “Wealth of Nations” noted that ‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. More recently, the more famous quotation was probably that of Gordon Gekko, the fictional hero of the 1987 film “Wall Street”, ‘Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms — greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge — has marked the upward surge of mankind’. The proof is out there for all to see – well, to someone looking. A series of corporate scandals and failures rocked the US economy in 2001 and 2002 – from Enron and WorldCom to Adelphi and even one of the “Big Five” accounting firms, Arthur Andersen. It turned out that much of the much-hyped growth and profits were clearly illusory, based on fraud and data manipulation, or simply put, lies. Two points that emerged then are still relevant today. First, such scams are not new nor unexpected; in fact they are part of capitalism’s normal functioning. Only most naive interpretations of the history of capitalism would leave out the crucial role played by fraud, deceit and open crime in the accumulation of capital and its subsequent use. While many of the financial malpractices continued for several years, they were exposed only when economic slowdown and the stock market bear trend fed into each other. Yet another (policy created) bubble in the US — this time directed to the housing market and financial proliferation — once again diverted attention and brought back the glory days for risk-loving CEOs of large companies, especially financial firms. The period 2002 to 2007 thus became, in the US and globally, a repeat of the earlier 1990s process on an even larger scale. It was the same dance, to just a slightly different tune, and joined by many more economic agents all over the world. Greed and boundless market optimism were back in fashion again. And the current crisis is not over yet. The major imbalances that were at the heart of the crisis still persist: the imbalance between finance and the real economy; the global macroeconomic imbalances; and ecological imbalance resulting from the pattern of growth. This cycle will repeat for eternity.
When Deccan Chronicle asked me to draw up a list of the 10 biggest scams of the past decade, I didn’t realise there were so many over the last two years alone. I gave up counting. A group of bleeding-heart do-gooders by the name of ‘Transparency International’ ranked India at the 85th position out of 179 countries in its annual “corruption perceptions index” in 2008. In fact, India’s score improved dramatically from 2.7 (out of 10) in 2002 to 3.4 in 2008. Does it mean that corruption has become better or that India is more transparent in its corruption today than before? Everybody accepts it as a way of life. Of capitalism and bureaucracy taking its charted path. We draw distinctions between the more corrupt and the less corrupt, the corrupt-but-efficient and the corrupt-and-inefficient – “that fellow accepts bribes but still refuses to do his job”. We are a nicely nuanced lot. But as a majority is so poor, none of this actually affects them. They have their own fish to fry (this is figurative because there aren’t enough fish to feed all the ugly masses). Scams therefore, escape our scrutiny for the same reason. Harshad Mehta, former employee of the New India Assurance Company who became a notorious stockbroker by presiding over a financial scandal involving Rs 4,000 crores. Byrraju Ramalinga Raju, who headed Satyam Computer Services confessed that he cooked the books of account of his flagship firm to the tune of Rs 8,000 crores. Ketan Parekh is a pale shadow of his former cocky self and few remember C.R. Bhansali’s claim to infamy. The IPO scam involving India Bulls and stock-broking firm Karvy is a distant development. And, have you recently heard anything about Abdul Karim Telgi who started life as a fruit and vegetable seller before he decided to bribe his way into the Nashik security printing press and forged wads of stamp paper? Madhu Koda started off as a labourer in a mine and a window-grill fitter before a small-time flunky in the BJP to a big-time beneficiary of the vagaries of coalition politics. He reportedly almost bought up a couple of uranium mines in South Africa before celebrations abruptly ended. But Koda’s shenanigans faded into insignificance before the occurrence of the “biggest” scam in independent India, namely, allotment of electro-magnetic spectrum to a clutch of mobile operator telephone companies at prices that were at least one-seventh their true market value. What was the loss to the nation? Only Rs 50,000 crores! This is India, after all, the world’s greatest democracy, where sibling rivalry can paralyse the working of the government. Imagine a tycoon splurging on front-page advertisements in dozens of newspapers to tell the world how the Union ministry of petroleum and natural gas was depriving the exchequer of huge amounts by favouring a fraternal company by agreeing to pay a higher price for natural gas taken out of the bed of the ocean in the Bay of Bengal. More than 250 aircraft and helicopters valued at not less than Rs 16,000 crores that were imported into the country between May 2007 and July 2008 by more than 70 companies controlled by some of the country’s most prominent industrialists after evading customs duty worth Rs 4,000 crores. Noteworthy that most of these private aircrafts were used not merely by corporate honchos, family members and business associates but also by “politician friends” during their election campaigns.
All said and done, capitalism works because it is first and foremost a monopoly – only because of a failure (and propagandic annihilation) of other systems to catch on, rather than any strict opposition or fair-play – because our pathetic little brains and genome vessels cannot think beyond self-preservation. During the cold war, the East looked in jealousy at West for the goods they have in their supermarkets. But now, the East which still suffers from poverty inspite of capitalism, looks in despair and hopelessness at the West for the debt-ridden luxury consumption that is the driver of growth more than industry. After all, we are animals who like cuckoos value trinkets like some yellow metal (read, gold) and pressurized rock (read, diamond) in high regard than that of the life of a fellow human and would be willing to commit unspeakable actions to the pursuit of stuff – white solids or black liquids or green paper or blue powder – that has absolutely no real tangible value if one really spends enough time to think and ponder about this madness.
This is getting boring, isn’t it? If one were to start chronicling the stories of human greed, it would take a million lifetimes. The MD of Alcatel-Lucent India, Vivek Mohan spoke, “It is high time for India to move on from ‘Copy the West’ phenomenon and develop innovative, India-specific stuff. I strongly believe that India is home to the best entrepreneurial talent and Indians have innovation in their DNA”. It is so very true. We are innovators in corruption and scams today after successfully imitating the West at a scale that boggles the mind. It is in our blood to be apathetic and suffer. Connection between capitalist greed and scams and the nexus between business and evil politics is neither new nor unique. What’s a few billions among friends, eh? Let’s talk about the weather instead. Oh wait, there is a scam brewing here too. Of railroad engineers, Pachauri and failed Presidential candidates, Gore who could be the first carbon billionaires if not already, which would be even cooler – paradoxically – to cash-in on the haze of mitigating/combating global warming.
Mathematics of War – 1 – Ecology and Patterns
Describes dynamical composition of an insurgency. Here, n_s is number of groups with strength s (> 1). The different terms describe processes of group coalescence, and group fragmentation.
I feel for Bohorquez and others because the spotlight seems to be on Gourley who is listed as the second author and we all (well OK, some geeks) know what that means as noticed in time-tested real-life graduate, academia and university life…
Ha ha. Having started communications with a joke as schooled, let us get to the abstract but not before mentioning that this paper is featured as the cover story of Nature beating out the ‘new earth discovery’ and ‘possible cancer cure’ which says as much of our fascination, nay, obsession with killing other people we don’t know, err… war, terrorism and occupation than nothing else. Enough trivia, le abstract…
Many collective human activities, including violence, have been shown to exhibit universal patterns*. The size distributions of casualties both in whole wars from 1816 to 1980 and terrorist attacks have separately been shown to follow approximate power-law distributions. However, the possibility of universal patterns# ranging across wars in the size distribution or timing of within-conflict events has barely been explored. Here we show that the sizes and timing of violent events within different insurgent conflicts exhibit remarkable similarities. We propose a unified model of human insurgency that reproduces these commonalities, and explains conflict-specific variations quantitatively in terms of underlying rules of engagement. Our model treats each insurgent population as an ecology of dynamically evolving, self-organized groups following common decision-making processes. Our model is consistent with several recent hypotheses about modern insurgency, is robust to many generalizations, and establishes a quantitative connection between human insurgency, global terrorism and ecology. Its similarity to financial market models provides a surprising link between violent and non-violent forms of human behaviour.
(*) I would think that the ‘why’ of universal patterns in any collective human activities, peaceful or violent, is fairly obvious to an acute observer, not just surreal zoologists such as Desmond Morris. We humans are a young and naive species. Inspite of our pretensions to be sentient and complex and underneath all the make-believe layers of civilization and smoke and mirrors, we are still nothing but animals with barbaric instincts influencing our thought patterns which are focused after all, on the primal need to feed, greed and breed. Everything, with a capital E considered, brain has not really evolved after an initial mutation burst but has only adapted
(#) Let me spare the suspense and list out the universal pattern across conflicts, purely by observation and my study and understanding of history (however little I seem to recall) without me reading the paper (which is gated) or the editors note or news article(s) or Q’n’A session or TED Talk or commentary or books like Naked Ape or Human Zoo or just about any sort of reference research whatsoever –
1) Humans organize themselves into collectives. It is natural
2) Each collective, duh, collects stuff that makes others jealous
3) Conflict ensues and power and control comes into equation
4) Vanquished seek revenge. Conquerors seek more blood
5) Uneasy peace exists but there is in-fighting and ambition
6) Objects of affection evolve from materials to idealisms
7) People just want to kill others brutally and be famous for it
A) Pattern holds for war and insurgency. Rinse and Repeat
There. We do not have to face an ordeal of the propaganda and rack our brains to read paper or any related materials to make sense of the world as seen through lens of war, or to be more precise, increasingly fluid insurgency that mathematically fits collected data. Wrong. I thought so too but my brain disagreed. It is a nasty piece of work and wanted to have a peek. After all, it is a beautifully written paper and only about 4 pages – most of which is justifying data gathering to the point of being apologetic – and a look-see will not take too much time or too much rewiring of the neurons. Or so, it said. As a principle, I dont argue with my brain. It makes me do unspeakable things and hurts me if I dont do its bidding. So, I complied and boy, was I glad I did? It was a page-turner and a well written piece of inquiry. Well done. I have much to say (continued in later posts where I delve into math, commentary from other places, media coverage and of course, cartoons), but for this piece, I will just cite/para-phrase/quote and expose a model schematic from the letter itself…
The political scientist Spirling and others have correctly warned that finding common statistical distributions (for example, power laws) in sociological data is not the same as understanding their origin. Possible political, ideological, cultural, historical and geographical influences make conflict arguably one the ‘messiest’ of all human activities to analyse. Mindful of these challenges, yet inspired by recent studies of human dynamics, we analyse the size and timing of 54,679 violent events reported within nine diverse insurgent conflicts, placing equal emphasis on both finding and modelling common patterns. Such insurgencies typify the future wars and threats faced by society. To our knowledge, our model provides the first unified explanation of high-frequency, intra-conflict data across human insurgencies. Other explanations of human insurgency are possible, though any competing theory would also need to replicate and/or fit the results. Our model’s specific mechanisms challenge traditional ideas of insurgency based on rigid hierarchies and networks, whereas its striking similarity to multi-agent financial market models hints at a possible link between collective human dynamics in violent and non-violent settings.
Taking our empirical findings for event size, and event timings. Our model (described in schematic) provides a quantitative explanation by treating the insurgent population as an ecology of dynamically evolving, decision-making groups, in line with several recent sociological hypotheses. In addition to explaining the ubiquity of approximate power-laws in the event size distribution it explains the conflict-dependent deviations beyond a power-law. Furthermore, the same model framework also explains the common burstiness in the distribution of event timings that we observe across insurgent conflicts. Following our preliminary 2005 results for Iraq and Colombia, we had suggested that other insurgent wars might be clustered around similar findings supporting our hypothesis. By contrast, we find that the Spanish Civil War and the American Civil War – neither of which are considered insurgent – each give distributions where log-normal can not be rejected, and therefore different from conventional wars. This finding provides quantitative support for claims circulating in social science that insurgent wars represent qualitatively different dynamics from traditional wars and can be classified as “open source”, “fourth generation” warfare – for lack of terms.
Insurgent population comprises of N people, weapons, resources, money etc. distributed into groups with diverse strengths at each time-step t. This distribution changes over time as groups join and break-up. Dark shadows indicate strength of numbers and fire-power, and hence severity of casualties that can be inflicted in an event involving that group.
Our model framework incorporates two key features: (1) ongoing group dynamics within the insurgent population (for example, as a result of internal interactions and/or the presence of an opposing entity such as a state army); (2) group decision-making about when to attack based on competition for media attention. Mechanism (1) is consistent with recent work on human group dynamics in everyday environments, and with current views of modern insurgencies as fragmented, transient and evolving. Mechanism (2) is consistent with comments by former US Senior Counter insurgency Adviser David Kilcullen (no kidding, this is the real name and is a combination of ‘kill’ and ‘cull’ – how apt), who noted that when insurgents ambush an American convoy in Iraq, “… they’re not doing that because they want to reduce the number of Humvees we have in Iraq by one. They’re doing it because they want spectacular media footage of a burning Humvee …”
If a group launches an attack during a day with many other attacks, its media coverage will in general be reduced. If, instead, it launches an attack on a quiet day, its media coverage will increase. Each group receives daily some common but limited information (for example, public radio or newspaper announcements about previous attacks, opposition troop movements, a specific religious holiday, even a shift in weather patterns). The actual content is unimportant provided it becomes the primary input for the group’s decision-making process (akin to a financial market). Although the groups are heterogeneous in terms of their strategies, they tend to converge towards similar responses when fed the same information. Our model also includes trapdoors allowing us to interpret the increase in non-randomness over time for Iraq and Colombia when insurgent groups in both wars have become less cautious over time about whether to launch attacks providing more fodder to empirical evidence that groups of humans do indeed use such generic decision-based mechanisms. The data for all the 9 conflicts deviates from its ‘random war’ model (randomizing event occurrences within each epoch): the ‘real war’ exhibits an over-abundance of “light days” (that is, days with few attacks) and of “heavy days” (that is, days with many attacks), but a lack of “medium days” compared with the ‘random war’. By considering subsets of days, we have determined that these features are not just an artefact of a variation in attack volume across days of the week (for example, Fridays). Interestingly, this burstiness has become more pronounced over time for the wars in both Iraq and Colombia, suggesting that they have become less random (ergo, more predictable) as they have evolved.
Just some high-level observations. One, this study shows humans are predictable and therefore, their actions, which is predictable on by and itself. Boy, you know, people don’t like to think that their lives can be tracked so accurately, but, uh, human action isn’t very different than any other data, is it? Two, what this letter really achieves is refute/ratify (not fully clear at this point) the mathematics of a fictional character Charlie Eppes in the CBS TV series Numb3rs Season 2, Episode 16 “Protest” where Charlie blurts that terrorists/insurgents/soldiers/fighters behave on the lines of a social network. They are after all, only human and like all other humans form social networks from bridge clubs and church groups to university staff and federal agencies to jihadi extremists. Mathematically, we can analyze these organizational structures to reveal who the leaders are. Now, these various insurgents or terrorists or freedom-fighters or even, anti-war anarchists (depends on which glasses one wears) are also social networks an analysis of which can reveal which members of groups got along, and which didn’t, and who linked up with people in other groups quantifying relationships. It reveals sub-structures in networks, like cliques, romances, even secret alliances with other groups. Now, using bipartite network analysis, one can identify who the true connectors are and bomb the crap out of them through unmanned predator strikes which will kill more innocent people prompting their loved kith and kin to take up arms against the marauding invaders who had no reason to be there in the first place. Three, there are people who are actually collecting the data which all made the headlines and getting international press right down to the international section in a local newspaper in rural Mongolia whereas the mission to Mars, or its postponement has become a footnote in history. Four, the authors are not really expounding any new theory. They say that current theories being explored by other people are somewhat true or false – it depends on the theory – based on quantitative analysis of public domain data on insurgent attacks. Five, perhaps, they need not have done this research at all. But since they did, they would have been better off explaining their work by just showing “Monty Python’s Life of Brian”, especially ‘Judean People Front’ vs. ‘People Front of Judea’ vs. ‘Judean Popular People Front’ vs. ‘Popular Front of Judea’ scene, “Romans Go Home” graffiti scene and kidnapping planning/execution scene where two groups land at the same time and scuffle that they thought of it first. Just a fun touch. Finally, the irony is if one has to verify if this model and/or the theory behind it holds any water using the scientific method i.e. conduct more experiments to see if it fits to new streams of data, we need more violence, more bombings, more killings and more attacks. The constant quandary of such analyses. To get more data, you need more wars in spirit of curiosity.
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.
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!
Buzzwords in Journal Publications
Global Warming is now Climate Change – Bees Buzz
The world is going to end in 2012, apparently – hopefully just before the start of the Olympic Games. Armageddon may come about as a consequence of those monkeys firing up the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, which can create black holes that can swallow the earth whole, or reduce it to the size of an extremely dense tennis ball. Or perhaps it will be giant solar flares frazzling the earth, or a sudden reversal of the earth’s magnetic field which will see us cooked like cheap burgers in a microwave oven. How do we know this? Apparently the Mayans predicted it. They’ll look pretty stupid if they were wrong, the Mayans. Nostradamus predicted it too and so, of course, did the Bible. One way or another we are destined to perish very soon. There’s a film out soon called 2012 which will explain it all, if you’re interested. I wonder where this yearning for catastrophe comes from? It seems to exist inside most of us; perhaps it is a Darwinian trait, a by-product of self-consciousness.
More to the point, though, you hear it every time a “climate-change” evangelist opens his or her mouth — and I wonder if ecological disaster is an upmarket version of the 2012 scenario, a catastrophe the chattering class of every country have eagerly bought into, a politically-correct Armageddon which requires us to be endlessly self-flagellating. My own view of climate change — or “global warming” as it used to be called, before the evangelists changed tack when they realised everything wasn’t getting warmer — is absolutely open. I am a little sceptical of man-made climate change because, for me, the raw statistics do not quite add up, but I certainly wouldn’t rule it out. And I also reckon that most of the stuff urged upon us in order to address climate change makes sense for other environmental reasons anyway. But this is not good enough; this makes me a climate-change denier and that’s not on. Because one is no longer allowed even to question climate change: it is a fact to be held sacred and never to be challenged.
So what about bees? You will undoubtedly have read many articles over the last year or so telling you that the bees are dying out and that, as a consequence of this, we will die out too. We are further told that bees are “largely” responsible for the pollination of world food crops. There is a film out at the moment called “The Vanishing of the Bees” – like the stuff done by Al Gore about climate change and books “A World Without Bees” and another one written by a Canadian about a dystopian fantasy about a beeless world. Legend has it that Einstein said, “If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left”, which is not true. This is a lesson; it is how Armageddon works, through Chinese whispers and pseudo-science. First, it is not true that there has been a mysterious worldwide collapse in honey bee populations. Most staple foods — wheat, rice and corn — do not depend on animal pollination at all. They are wind-pollinated, or self-pollinating. If all the bees in the world dropped dead tomorrow afternoon, it would reduce our food production by only between four and six per cent. A paper which publishes these results does not yet seem to have been picked up by the mainstream press, still less the campaigners, the politicians or the distributors of films and authors and publishers of books and others with parasitical tendencies. Nobody likes an Armageddon whipped from beneath their feet. You hold on to it. Tight. Very.
Carbon Capture and Sequestration – Earthly Ideas
The idea of “Carbon Capture and Sequestration” (CCS) is a highly controversial one. Some environmentalists (for whom nothing seems to be good enough, ever) think it is an excuse to keep relying on fossil fuels for energy. Managements of coal plants and oil companes swear to clean up their act (as these assholes have been doing it for ages). In reality, it is an excuse to keep burning fossil fuels but it is not JUST an excuse because let us face it, every week there are new coal-fired power plants popping up around the world (to satisfy an insatiable appetite for electricity) and the owners of these plans are going to do their best to make sure they are used. After all, power plants cost billions of dollars (provide employment and development) and it is in no one’s interest (except sissy activists who BTW most of them dont even know the definition of ‘power cuts’ and ‘energy poverty’ and there is no evidence of this joke collective switching to expensive greener power or living off-the-grid for even a few hours a day to do their bit except on some hyped about 1 lousy hour per year, what was that? Earth Day?) to just try and shut them down.
The point of CCS technology is to allow all these plants to keep producing energy without
More Summits – Less Solutions – More Inequality
(*) Inequality is defined as the income gap between the top and bottom 10 per cent of wage earners. The data is via World of Work Report 2008 – Global Income Inequality Gap is Vast and Growing. The numbers of course have been normalized to somehow limit axes overflow
Hindsight is always 20/20 but this is hardly unexpected of course because if the leaders (and I use this term very loosely) of the world are jetting off to exotic locations for meetings, their countries are left to the dogs, which while better on one hand, is proving a detriment to general populace. It seems to me that this is a contagious disease. With politicians being in the Top-10 percent of wage earners, the sheer number of summits and thereby the taxpayers money they claim/guzzle to attend this nonsensical meetings is maybe, contributing to the inequality. Just me.
GE Edison Challenge – Renewable Energy for India
Raghotham in GE Edison Spotting reports on some of the student demonstrations at GE Edison Challenge 2009 in Bangalore (you cannot lure me to use the new name Reddy buggers). Here is a nice photo (of ‘Urjas’ or ‘Tech Innovas’) from IIT-Bombay (used B-word Thackerey morons) followed by clips from other finalists from IIT-Madras (get it?), SVCE, IIT-Kharagpur…
Srinath Ramakkrushnan and his IIT-Madras team who call themselves ‘Graminavitas’, are a lot more ambitious lot, proposing an integrated solution that spans rice de-husking in Natham, a 300-household village 60 km north of Chennai (with a de-husking machine he himself made after a two-year stay in Ujire in Karnataka) to building a micro-grid architecture that would partly use biogas produced from the husk to produce power to providing a workable public toilet system to improve rural sanitation to using the waste from the toilet to produce biogas to replace the need for LPG… phew.
Neha (chirpy 20-something Punjabi kudi in pink tees and blue jeans) and team from Sri Venkateswara College of Engineering are trying to produce electricity using local resources in a village in Tamil Nadu so they can have power supply round-the-clock, instead of just two hours a day. The ‘Energy Boosters’ chose Kaliyapettai village near Chennai, which has a textile mill nearby discharging industrial effluents. Neha and friends used the effluents as nutrients to grow algae on. Algae convert carbon dioxide absorbed from the atmosphere into lipids, which are then converted into biodiesel to generate electricity in a diesel generator. The team grew algae in a tank and have sent in the oil they produced for analysis of its power potential. Neha says the oil produced in 5 days can power lighting for the village’s 600 families through the day, for an initial cost of as little as Rs. 1 lakh (or 2000$).
Shashikant Burnwal, Arnab Chatterjee and Ashim Sardar of IIT-Kharagpur have built a pot-in-pot storage system that helps store vegetables and cooked food at temperatures as low as 8 to 10 degree Celsius, using nothing more than two earthen pots and a fan picked up from the insides of a desktop computer. Refrigeration, with minimal electricity necessitated by global warming. They have also designed a home cooling system in which sunlight falls on a PVC roof and heats it up, causing airflow between low pressure and high pressure areas, cooling homes – again, no electricity used.
Are these ideas, and those of the other 15 teams, practical, scaleable and worth the trouble? Well, the judges went around grilling the participants on the economics, the scientific principles and technology and the novelty of the ideas. GE and the Indian government’s Department of Science and Technology (through DSIR TEPP program) have already sweetened the deal. Each of the 18 finalist teams will take home Rs.20,000. In addition, GE will award the winning team, to be announced on Friday, Rs.5 lakh and a runner-up Rs. 1 lakh. And, to boot, the DST will consider funding their ideas so they can turn it into reality. While I feel that I have seen some if not all of these ideas during the days when there was only one TV channel in India (so the whole family watched just about everything from cheesy Mahabharatha to agricultural programs on biogas and mushroom farming), I suppose, there are some positives. Atleast it got some people thinking even if it is heavily incentivized.
Genetic Engineering and Bt Stuff. Scary? Maybe
While Suman is a gender neutral name, I can sense that this Sahai is a woman. All she does is talk some mumbo-jumbo and complain. And complain. Taste this…
What, you may ask, is common between potatoes, tomatoes, brinjal, chilli, datura, tobacco and the deadly nightshade (belladonna)? They all belong to a plant family called Solanaceae. The Solanaceae family contains a number of important agricultural plants as well as many psychoactive and toxic plants. Solanaceae species are rich in complex chemicals called alkaloids and contain some of the most poisonous plants known to mankind. They produce alkaloids in their roots, leaves and flowers. These alkaloids can be hallucinogens, stimulants or outright toxic. Farmers have been working for thousands of years to domesticate wild plants like those of the Solanaceae family, to make them safe for eating. This continues to this day and age.
Now brinjal, a member of this family, has been genetically engineered (GE) to produce a toxin to protect itself against a particular pest. This seems to be a process working to reverse several thousand years of efforts to detoxify natural plants to make them fit for human consumption which could be dangerous since disturbing their genetic material through the process of inserting new gene constructs containing a battery of genes – including the toxin producing Bt gene – may trigger off metabolic processes that have been lying dormant. There are apprehensions that not only could new toxins develop but that old toxins that were removed by selective breeding may reappear. Disturbing cell metabolism of species that are naturally genetically hardwired to produce toxins, is likely to call up old plant toxins in species.
Testing for food safety is key in GE plants; it becomes more so with the Solanaceae family. At present biotechnology companies rely on the concept of “substantial equivalence” to demonstrate the safety of genetically engineered foods. In this method, the overall chemical composition of the genetically engineered food is compared to an equivalent conventional food. If there is no significant difference between the two, the GE plant is considered to be safe. Mahyco seed company has also tested its Bt brinjal in the same way. However, “substantial equivalence” is a highly contested paradigm, favored by the biotech industry but rejected by most countries. This is because there is no mechanism in such an approach to detect unexpected or unintended changes like new toxic compounds in cells.
She does not stop there. She yaps and yaps and yaps about food labelling, Codex Alimentarius (that is a mouthful), Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC), consumers right to informed choice (yeah right), consumer protection act (oh, stop the tickling), identity preservation, rural awareness and what not. If I were in the same room, I would ask her to just zip it and shut up. She seems to be the only geneticist in the whole wide world who seems to know about GE foods and Bt crops and that everyone else out there are in bed with big corporates to kill off the human species by poisoniing with Bt brinjal. As some of the comments have said, such kind of doubts were and will be there before every scientific advancement of agriculture, like hybrids. The gene modified in brinjal or cotton is only poisonous for the insects/borers not humans. Latest hybrids and GE fruits and vegetables are supposed to be a proof of successful experiments and progress in the field of agricultural science giving rise to bigger, colourful and plentiful produce. It could be that they might cause health problems in the future and when it happens, we will still not be able to isolate the cause. If due testing has been done, and there is no counter evidence, I am all for food security needs of overgrowing population. Of course, natural things are the best. Everybody knows that but sadly, there is a limit to that (look at sad staggering figures of malnutrition) and it would be an awful waste of human intellect if we cannot manipulate nature to solve our problems.
Ads as Monetizers for Real-time Search – Puhleeze
As major events unfold, Twitter, Facebook and other similar services are increasingly becoming the nation’s virtual water coolers to become an instant record of Americans’ collective preoccupations. It’s no wonder, then, that pundits and investors are salivating over the prospect of an effective way to search this information. For all the buzz, however, one question remains unanswered: How easily can real-time search turn into real cash?
No one doubts that helping users find fresh, up-to-the-minute content on the Web is valuable. But plenty of other valuable Web services – including content sites, free Web e-mail and social networks – have struggled to find effective business models. “We have no idea how much you can make off of real-time search,” said Danny Sullivan, a veteran search industry analyst and editor of Search Engine Land, an industry blog.
Search advertising is probably the most effective form of marketing ever invented. Because search queries telegraph a users’ intent with precision, they make it possible to match people with the right ads at the right moment. If real-time search is ever to achieve the same kind of magic, it needs a large volume of queries and the same ability to match users’ intent with ads.
Real-time search entrepreneurs dispute this. Others say examples abound of queries that could be matched with ads: a search for tweets about snow conditions may be an advertising opportunity for ski resorts; one about poor cellphone coverage could attract ads from a rival network etc. Users are exposing their intent, and you have an opportunity to match it.
Google said that real-time search is valuable, though not necessarily because the queries will generate as much cash as regular searches. “We don’t know enough about what kinds of queries people would issue against real-time data to know how monetizable it is,” said Marissa Mayer. Google wants the Twitter data primarily because its mission is to be comprehensive: Google wants to organize all of the world’s information, including the Web’s fleeting real-time conversations to keep people searching on Google.
Interesting arguments, eh? But quite sad. First of all, real-time web is not just about Twitter (aka, what people are having for their breakfast) which is a post for another day. Secondly, monetization of any web service need not be shovelled into fitting ads (like, depending on the breakfast, show people ads related to butter and jam) which is yet another post. Thirdly, search (and banners) is not the holy grail of monetization. Data is THE currency. Finally, am on it. Patience my precious’.
FOAF as Identity – Proof by Ye Olde Adage
In both cases, it is pretty clear that FOAF information can be used as an identity. In fact, creating/uploading an FOAF file and using a corresponding URI pointing to it, or some pertinent information inside it, can be a full-pledged identity on the web ala OpenID with stuff like SSL useful for double verification and such. It is complicated. Dont ask. Just dig around. While doing so myself to understand this side-effect, I realized that of course, FOAF information can be used as identity and one does not have to be a geek or philosopher to understand how it is feasible. Truth is, this is ancient wisdom as encapsulated in the adage, “a person is known by the company of the friends he/she keeps”. An aha moment indeed. Slick, eh?
Sociological Utility of 2-degree Social Graph – FOAF
Several teens come up with extraordinary tales about their ‘Friend of a Friend‘ (FOAF) to look cool at parties and social dos. Did your friend’s friend spot a UFO recently? Or watch two King Cobras fighting in the wild? Did your friend’s friend dream about the tsunami before it happened? Teens love relating tall tales loaded with drama, suspense and intrigue. So what if their lives aren’t as exciting as they’d like them to be. They make up for it by falling back on the strategy of FOAF (teens have several), who, from listening to them, seem to have done the wildest, craziest and most outrageous things. Teenagers are turning experts at coming up with FOAF stories to raise their ‘cool’ factor at parties and social dos. “My FOAF is too cool, according to my friends, and that just makes me cool by association,” grin the young buggers even if the FOAF stories are so far-fetched that they border on urban legends. Sometimes, the FOAF excuse is trotted out by teens to narrate something embarrassing that they did themselves, but don’t want to own up to, which nevertheless makes for a good story to get everyone’s attention at parties. Inspite of the doubtable ethics, it might be that the FOAF is every teens BFF”
I guess it is very important for people to let other people know that they know some cool people even if those people are just a figment of their imagination or in those cases they exist, they are not aware of their own and self existence. And if someone is creepy enough to follow up the truth, one can always escape by attributing it to the phenomenon of chinese whispers/rumours. So, there you go. FOAF have a utility in real life and no wonder, this is reflected in online life. Bring on the XML and graphs!
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Social Graph, Platform Wars and Giant Global Graph
The bi-word “social graph” has been the term of my choice since 2003 to describe my ‘relationships summa’ with other people in the real and digital world. Terms like “personal web” and “implicit web” have also done the rounds. Apparently the conflict of which term to use is not just raging in my mind but in new age media too. Some are of the opinion that a graph and a network are the same thing and so, one should use the accepted term “social network” to describe the XML expressible (not as simple as FOAF though) relationships information. They make a good case and I sorta agree that the world does not need yet another term but I want to throw the hat in the ring and put forth my contention that there is justification in the not-so-new “social graph” term. Simple argument is le entity is more than an aggregation of “social network”(s). I opine that every person is born with a “social graph” but only a select few – or roughly 20% of the worlds population by 2012 who have access to ICT – have “social network”(s) as we know it. There is another and more stark distinction on the lines of ownership. I strongly believe in the idea that the “social graph” is a personal construct that is to be defined and indeed editable, by the person and therefore, it should be owned by the user whereas, “social network” as it exists today does not have to be so strict. In fact, we see this all around us. A decently online person has several “social network” information in islands of Web 2.0 services like Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Twitter, iLike and what have you but does not own the soul. Email, IM, Newsgroups, Forums etc. are classic examples of application level “social network” and mobile phone contacts, company numbers spreadsheets, college yearbooks, little black diaries et al. are examples of hard to capture “social network” silos. Hence, we need a seperate term such as “social graph” to describe the aggregated superset of networks we happen to find ourselves a part of in the course of our trivial existence. The irony of the connected age is that even if we integrate all of these networks together, it will not be an exact mirror of the graph that a person has in his/her mind. Needless to say, it is a hard problem to compile an accurate per-user “social graph” and one of these days, I hope to be fortunate enough to have a crack at it and take a step towards building a Memex kind of a thing. Quick research has pointed out that several others want to do it too and there is a platform war going on since 2007 as we speak…
Sorry for the digression. Coming back to the conundrum of the “social graph” term, I was led to a TNT post by Valdis Krebs which gives an etymology of the term when it started making the rounds in the blogosphere circa mid-2008. The TNT post was a comment on a rambling post by Tim Berners-Lee in which he expounds that the semantic web popularly known as Web 3.0 will be about “Giant Global Graph” (GGG) which views the world on the basis of how people are connected. So, this post is a comment on the TNT post which is a comment on the GGG post. This is how comments on the blogosphere should have been working from the start instead of stupid comment sections at flag ends. End of rant. Start of quotes…
This week we witnessed a tipping point for the term “social graph” – originally a term used by mathematicians and sociologists – currently the buzz of the social web community. When the designer of the web, Tim Berners-Lee (TBL) got involved with the term battles, the tipping concluded in a load cacophony of bloggers commenting on the concept. One of TBL’s insights was very simple, yet useful. He explained how Internet is changing focus from the connections between computers to the connections between people. Sir Tim explained the change using three, three-letter acronyms. First, he started with the III – International Information Infrastructure which grew up to be the Internet. On top of the III, TBL built the WWW – World Wide Web, which is really about how documents are connected. And finally he sees the GGG – Giant Global Graph, which connects people and objects
So the Net and the Web may both be shaped as something mathematicians call a Graph, but they are at different levels. The Net links computers, the Web links documents. The Graph links people. We are all interested in friends, family, colleagues, and acquaintances. There are cries from the heart (e.g Open Social Web Bill of Rights) for my friendship, that relationship to another person, to transcend documents [and even applications] fired by an angst against the plethora of social network sites which are not excited about connections as they should be. In the long term vision, thinking in terms of the “social graph” is critical to us making best use of a wild zoo of devices, connectivity and applications. Then, when I book a flight it is the flight that interests me. Not the flight page. I’ll be thinking in the graph. My flights. My friends. Things in my life. My breakfast – yoghurt, nuts, and fresh fruit
Well, there you go. A full blast on the origins of the “social graph” term which has been creeping in. Brad Fitzpatrick talks about users wanting to own their graphs, as does Alex Iskold, who discusses “social graphs” and network theory in general. In 2009, we are nowhere near where we should be because while our networks grew in size and numbers, they are still isolated and even when dirtily combined, they are but a slice of real life. Yet, slices are useful. This is how CAT (computer assisted tomography) scans work. The photographic slices of our complex bodies help doctors diagnose our ailments. You need the focused slice to understand, looking at the whole often results in overwhelming confusion. Do we need the GGG? Yes, like a map of the world, it will have applications. Yet, most of us are much happier with local maps revealing local dynamics for our local lives. So, a per-user “social graph” or a detailed and accurate slice of life would be great for kickin starters.
Google, reCaptcha and Crowd Computing
Two words are always presented. The trick is that reCaptcha already knows one of the words, but wants you to help solve the other word. If enough people solve that other word similarly, the system gains confidence and now knows what that word reads. The second word is a typically smudged one that even the most complicated systems cannot solve. Or, they are just crowdsourcing OCR tasks to millions of people. Hence, reCaptcha is a “crowd computer”. reCaptcha’s utility is to provide spam protection AND help turning scanned books into searchable digital text in open domain
Google clearly aims to apply reCaptcha for their books and newspaper digitization projects to help with the quality of their existing OCR (Optical Character Recognition). This now means you’ll also help Google’s efforts. reCaptcha mentions they’re serving 30 million Captchas daily and that generally, people spend roughly 10 seconds on a captcha – that’s quite some human computing power. Do the math. Assuming, a typical brains capacity is a few petaflops (on a focused task), this could very well be the beginning of the worlds most powerful and cleverest supercomputer!
Who’s to say that in the future, we’ll not be solving other captcha tasks? Telling humans and bots apart and several other puzzles are tough for today’s AIs, but easy for humans. For instance, a captcha may show you a collection of a dozen images and ask you to click on all images showing a cat. For most images Google knows whether it’s a cat or not, but for one image, Google only suspects that it’s a cat based on keywords found on the same page the pic was hosted on. If many people click that picture, Google may gain confidence that it’s indeed a cat (or conversely that it isn’t)
These are straightforward applications; even more power could be unleashed if any company figures out a possibility to break up bigger questions into easy humanly solvable chunks, which would – after being solved – be merged to form a deeper answer. Maybe at some point, people would be selling the computing cycles too. Not unlike how Amazon is selling cloud computing cycles. Else we’re slaves.
Studies Show Feminism Benefits Men
In the early 1970s, breaking out of the domestic cocoon, leaving their mothers’ circumscribed lives behind, young women felt exhilarated and bold. But the more women have achieved, the more they seem aggrieved. Did the feminist revolution end up benefiting men more than women? According to the General Social Survey, which has tracked Americans’ mood since 1972, and five other major studies around the world, women are getting gloomier and men are getting happier. As Arianna Huffington points out in a blog post headlined The Sad, Shocking Truth About How Women Are Feeling: “It doesn’t matter what their marital status is, how much money they make, whether or not they have children, their ethnic background, or the country they live in. Women around the world are in a funk”. (The one exception is black women in America, who are a bit happier than they were in 1972, but still not as happy as black men which is another story)
When women stepped into male-dominated realms, they put more demands – and stress – on themselves. If they once judged themselves on looks, kids, hubbies, gardens and dinner parties, now they judge themselves on looks, kids, hubbies, gardens, dinner parties – and grad school, work, office deadlines and meshing a two-career marriage. Choice is inherently stressful. The more important things that are crowded into their lives, the less attention women are able to give to each thing. Add this to the fact that women are hormonally more complicated and biologically more vulnerable. Another daunting thing: America is more youth and looks obsessed than ever, with an array of expensive cosmetic procedures that allow women to be their own Frankenstein Barbies. There is a newfound abundance of choices, even if those choices end up making us unhappier. A paradox, indeed.
Phew! Thank God or more specifically, the Y Chromosome that I am a man for we can age in an attractive way while women are expected to replicate their 20s into their 60s. Greater prosperity has made men happier. And they are also relieved of bearing sole responsibility for their family finances. Men also tend to fare better romantically as time wears on. There are more widows than widowers, and men have an easier time getting younger mates. Who knew that being casual and unattached actually helps? It is so happy to be simple and more so, vice-versa.
Getting Attention to Research Posters
Resume Talks says Pakistan to India
Of course, Pakistan talks in the language that India understands only too well…
India Political Machine – Garbage In, Zilch Out
Slumdog Child Sale – Greedy Father – Whats New?
Numbers dont lie. There are 507 (and counting) news articles about a Slumdog child being sold by the father. Let us lay down the points –
1) A poor carpenter – ‘bottom of pyramid’ bloke earning about 4$/day
2) Many children of his struggling for a good life (education etc.)
3) One child lucky to be a movie extra and make some fame
4) Someone rich wants to adopt the child in exchange for money
5) Rhetorical, but should the father sell the daughter for adoption? YES
In my feeble opinion, the father would be an idiot not to accept the offer of adoption in the best interests of the child and his other children. In fact, I would say that this ‘child selling for adoption’ model is a rather good business. There should be companies who can clean-up ugly labouring kids and sell; yes, sell these exotic children to rich blokes worldwide. It would immediately increase the per-capita income, reduce the carbon footprint, minimise the burden of the family, society and country. Isn’t that what the BoP buggers want? No, wait, that is wrong. They want to sell cheap, low-quality, sachetized products to the poor markets, suck out whatever little money they have and thereby fooling them to feel empowered. Even otherwise, if there ever was a case for a socially responsible company that can resolve many ills of poverty, this could be a good one. As for the money and selling. Minor children are the property/responsibility of the parents. So, by free-market principles, they can be traded. I dont see anything wrong with this business as long as adoption is what is happening and there are audits. Do you? I am all for sale of children for adoption. Setup an online petition or suggest as a fund-raising initiative for some charity.
After all, there is evidence with the progress that blacks have made in the West that selling people to rich masters has long-term benefits. Heck, one Nth generation mixed-race slave is a president. And the rest of them seem to be enjoying their exponentially better lives when compared to their brothers in Africa as far as the rap, sports, crime, movies, army and obesity situations go. Would the blacks in the industrialized world be where they are today if they were not traded off as slaves? I hardly think so. Hence, selling and shipping off people has documented benefits.
With this out of the way, let us get to the sarcasm. All this hoopla has been the antics of a reporter team from a wait-for-it, British tabloid. Because the headline has ‘slumdog’ and the text has ‘india’, this gets picked up by the horrible Indian media. There is live TV coverage. There are chinese whispery syndications going about in all major newspapers. Blah. Blah. Blah.
The sad part of the sale and adoption is that this is being seen from a moral angle. That the child is being victimized and the father is greedy. In the same coin, whenever some psycho celebrities like Madonna and Angelina Jolie adopt kids from poor countries, it is seen as a good thing. There too, there is an exchange of a child and money (donations, hellooo).
So, if journalistic standards exist anywhere, the British sting operation and moral superiority should be taken to task. What did they achieve anyway? That poor people are greedy and are willing to sell children. Everyone knows that. The biggest irony of course is that no one but the paid reporters of the British tabloid and the copy-cat Indian journalists have seen any money out of all this. So, it begs the question. Who really are the lecherous repugnant malodorous pile of ringworm dropping scum now? Hint: It is not the gutter slumdog father.
Thermodynamics and Recession – Fate of Civilization
1) The first law of thermodynamics states that matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed. This implies that everything that is, everything that ever was, and everything that will ever be, was present at the birth of the universe albeit in a more elementary form
2) The second law of thermodynamics states that a closed system without the introduction of additional energy from outside will move toward greater entropy, defined as a measure of disorder. This implies that whatever exists will disintegrate (even universe)
So a system far from equilibrium will move towards greater complexity and disorder when unchecked. Cue, the stock market, internet landscape, real-estate market, bank systems and the like. Who knew that the rather patronizing laws of thermodynamics (is there proof?) will be able to explain the systemic corrections introduced into these systems by externalities – popularly known as recessions, crisis, meltdown, crashes, bubbles, collapse, depressions et al.
Of course, the energy/matter dichotomy in this context would be money/schemes (which are virtual ponzi constructs) and the jolt being ‘regulation’ (which is opposed in a free market economy). Ergo, free market economies of the de-regulated kind are doomed to failure every once in a while. It is just in their nature to have a periodic armageddon. This is not a conspiracy nor intrinsically bad because the pieces are picked, lessons are learned, history is repeated and the cycle starts all over again – but with each iteration, the complexity increases leading to, hopefully, better efficiencies and practices. Am not a commie loving son of a gun.
Ooh! That is optimistic which has to counter-balanced with a ‘sky is falling’ shriek. You have been warned. The same laws of thermodynamics applies equally at a planetary scale. Take for example, a little blue marble called earth. The dinosaurs ruled this planet and it was getting out of hand. Everything was just getting bigger and uglier (no respect to Barney) when a correction in the form of an asteroid collision reset the entropy leading to the rise of mammals and then to humans now ruling the planet (or so we think for we have visions of grandeur, heck we made that up). Thermodynamics it seems is not without a sense of irony.
Our very progress, is now the cause of global warming and climate change which threatens our very survival. We are now at a rather high state of disorder and unless the correction comes in some form or another. Whether it comes through the wrath of omnipresent powerful invisible guy from above (God according to George Carlin) like a flood (which incidentally figures in every mythology from Hinduism to Mayan to Christian), or massive human-designed geo-engineering projects (or nuclear war or global consciousness) or just wait for the inevitable (2012, Kalki, asteroid) is a choice we have to make for ourselves. Personally my money (pun) is on the nuclear war. But an asteroid hit would be cool too. Atleast with the latter, the earth has experience and can recover quicker than before. Global consciousness (apologies to the green and activist brigade) is a dead horse. No point flogging it at all.
No Double Standards – Support Iran, N. Korea
In fact, it is stupid at a species level that technology is not being transferred and is being re-iinvented all over. Every nation has the right to develop nuclear, rocket, space or whatever capability they want to – peaceful or violent. No one opposed the West when they were building up nukes to blast the earth several hundred times over, did they? Even if there was opposition, they obviously did not give a damn. Just as the rest of the world should not give a damn to their bickerings. I oppose these double standards. Go Iran, N. Korea and India.
Science Experiment Roullette – Research Life
The hands-on work, the thrill of gathering data, the excitement of discovery, the work ethic, the long hours, thinking about solutions to hard problems, buried in work, too poor to fly home for holidays, playing solitaire with no idea how to play… Ah! to be a student again. Good times. I think sometimes, it is hard not to look back at your life and wonder if all the hard work, pressure and sacrifices have been worth it. Aww humbug, who cares? I got a job and things to do.
Thoughtcrafts Sriks6711 
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