I like to drop in at the children’s sabbath school at church from time to time and engage the kids in a story. Kids love stories. And if they were to be accompanied by sound effects and theatrics, as I usually render my stories, they love it even more. “Today, I am going to tell you a story”, I would say, “I want you to listen very carefully. And I want you to listen carefully since I would be asking a lot of questions after I am done with the story.” And they would listen to my story carefully and answer all the questions correctly after I am done.

I think it was Tamil. I remember using Malayalam to communicate with my grandmother from Kerala, for she knew no other language, but other than that it was mostly Tamil at home, school and church. Of course, the school used English as a medium of education, as advertised. But like most other schools in this country, English was used as a language to test rather than to think and articulate.

In most primary schools across this country, teachers impart knowledge in English to students whose only exposure to the language would be at school. Everyday, the child crosses over in to an alien world where the language that he uses for thinking would not be the language used for education. Teachers are expected to mark the completion of each lesson or topic in the syllabus by handing out questions and answers.

And unlike at the church, where the kids immediately articulated their received their knowledge and answered my questions using their own words and framing sentences in whichever language they thought was best, children at school are expected to learn the answers by rote and produce them verbatim during the examinations. This system seems to have evolved from a need to help students whose first language is not the medium of instruction. As these children move into middle and high school, understanding, thinking and articulating becomes a tedious two step process. For example, in an examination, a question would be translated in to the native tongue, an answer would be formulated in the same tongue and then translated back into the medium of instruction.

Worse, in some schools the practice of handing out questions and answers continues well into high school and for some students, education turns out into a simple mix of pattern recognition and efficient rote learning algorithms. Some students are lucky to escape, either due to circumstances or by enlightened parents. But for the vast majority, this continues to be the sorry state.

In the middle of my third term of my second standard, my family moved to Bangalore. Bangalore was a whole new ball game. It was a cosmopolitan culture at school and in my neighbourhood, where I had no choice but to communicate in English. Sensing the need to improve my English, my mother brought in some changes in the way we (my brother and I) communicated at home. We decide to communicate with my mother in English while it is was decided that we would stick to Tamil for communication with my Dad. Communication between my brother and me was done in English.

This proved to be a turning point for me. Tamil took a back seat while English started to rule the roost in my life. Slowly, English became the medium of my thought and articulation. Today, I think in English and I write and speak better in English than any other language that I know – Tamil, Hindi or Malayalam. The fate was further sealed when I moved to Kerala for my high school and higher secondary where I was again in an environment where I could use nothing but English for communication. In addition, I started loving the language, thanks to the English curriculum of ICSE and ISC.

Coming back to the present, I visited my nephew last Saturday. He is my favourite nephew and he is very smart. He had turned four recently and his parents, my cousin and my brother in law, decided to put him in school. Being good parents and wanting the best for their kid, they sent him to a good “English medium” school. That should have made me happy. But sadly, I was not!

My nephew is now growing up in an environment where there is little chance of exposure to English other than at school. Both his parents speak Tamil at home and were educated in the Tamil medium. They have very little or no knowledge of the English language. The people around him are culturally homogeneous, which means that child would also communicate in Tamil with others around him. My brother in law is deeply religious and attends a church, a Tamil one. So, my nephew would learn to think and articulate in his native tongue, while being forced to learn in an alien language at school.

Being in such a circumstance, definitely hinders a child’s learning, imagination and exploring capacity. The child would be hindered by his inability to answer a question naturally using his own words but would have to rely on the answers provided by the teachers. This would encourage rote learning and prove a strong barrier to creative and original thinking and reasoning.

India’s economy seems to be powered by English. The ads on television and the print media offer a thousand ways for people to master the English language. A person who failed it to make it to college earns twice or thrice of the pure science or mathematics graduate purely on the basis that he is able to manage to call up someone in Atlanta and offer them a phone package using a fake accent. With the boom of the IT and ITES industries, and the glitter of cars and houses, people in this country have strongly come to believe that English is the miracle that this country was waiting for and the pill for all troubles.

And we sometimes take pride in the fact that our love affair with the English language would somehow help us in our race with our northern neighbours. Sometimes our comparisons even dare to bring in advanced economies where English is not the primary language. But, we forget to ask the most important question: What is the kind of prosperity has English brought us? Would we be continue to be the cheap back office for the world while we destroy creativity and imagination in our children? How long can this be sustained? Can the future bear the rape of an entire generation?

My friends in the scientific research community would now make a mention that most research in this world is produced and shared in English. That is absolutely right. But, what about the Germans, the Japanese and the Russians? These folks continue to maintain their scientific and technology lead in spite of their primary and middle school education being in their native tongue. And I feel that it is highly important that a child thinks and articulates in the language that he or she is most comfortable in. Maybe English can continue to serve as a second language until the child is ready to master any language.

This blog is not a rant against English. The laptop on which I type this blog shares its space on the table with four great tragedies of Shakespeare. I am one of the moderators of the “Towards Better English” community at my work place. I continually strive to improve my use of my first language, as English has now become, and I love this language. While I would like to see the language being used by many people, I would also to see it not thrust upon hapless kids.This post is about choices.

How are parents going to deal with this issue? Are parents going to change and bring in a significant level of English at homes and social circles or are they going to change the schools of their children if the former is not possible? And what would be the solution to provide a knowledge of the English language at a latter stage in life, if the latter is done?

I disagree.

It is not a human nature to take the second look. A reflex action is an involuntary response to a stimuli, for which the neural signal does not reach your brain but rather propagates through the reflex arc in your spinal chord which is part of your peripheral nervous system.

But the second look is not a reflex. It is a classical case of classical conditioning. If it is a reflex, I would like to know why people, even children, who suffer from congenital conditions do not seem to have it. Because, from childhood they know how it is to be looked at, a second time. But for the rest of us, we have got so used to taking a second look, that we have now forgotten that is a something that we picked up from our environment.

I agree.

When you take the second look, you might be thinking about the welfare of the person. But humans, quite unfortunately, do not have the ability to read minds. So, though you might be look up to the person or think about their welfare, for him or her, you are no different from any other person who takes the second look. How do you expect him or her to know to know that your second look is not a look of pity or sympathy but of appreciation?

Sometimes you get the oppurtunity to interact with that person whom you gave the second look. The person comes to know that you were not giving him “the look”. But most of the time, we do not get an oppurtunity to explain our second look. And in such cases, it is the very right of the person who was looked at, to interpret your look in whatever way they want and also maybe feel hurt. Why then take the second look?

I dream.

I dream of a day when transgenders would be able to work with us in our cubicles without getting a second look or feel uneasy. I dream of a day when every transgender kid born in this country would not have to escape to Mumbai but take life as it comes, just because.

I dream of a day when a kid who suffers from a severe congenital condition, maybe Osteogenesis imperfecta or Aspergers or something deforming like a cleft lip or palate can still hang out with friends at the playground or go to school.

I dream of a day when different would be normal.

I wish.

I wish you wouldn’t stop teasing me because of this post or the one before. It was not about me. It about that person in my online support group who attempted suicide and then died from a fatal accident caused due to alcohol. It is about that person, again in my online support group, who said that she did not have a close friend other than from the support group.

It was not about me. I wish you wouldn’t stop teasing me.

Just imagine that if you woke up on your 60th birthday and figured out that you dragged yourself to work for the past 40 years of your life? Wouldn’t that be pathetic? But yet, many of us drag ourselves us to work every day. We sit in front of our monitors and tap on our keyboards and gyrate our mice, emotionally disconnected from what our hands and minds do because our hearts are some place else. We speak about “work-life balance” without even giving a thought to the utter absurdity of the term.

Some of us are least bothered. We never had a passion in life and we never cared. And some of us did have a passion, an yearning to do something that we truly loved. And we now live in denial, telling ourselves that it is fate and that we need to stick to what destiny has planned for us. We tell ourselves that our parents have a standing in society and that it needs to be preserved. The pressure of our peers and the mockery our relatives, didn’t we have enough?

My story today revolves around two people, whose names I do not wish to reveal.  One of them is about to finish his first year MBBS at CMC, while the other just joined as a fresher for the same program this year. They are 23. Yes, they are as old as me. And I just completed two years in the corporate world! Do you know how difficult is to find yourself in the company of people who are disconnected from you emotionally by age? Do you know how difficult it is to get ordered around or even ragged when you are an adult? Well, at least it is not as hard as finding out that you should have done something else in your life when you are old and have a grandchild on your lap!

So, what did you want to be? A physicist? An economist? An architect? A doctor? A dentist? A writer? - the deep earning of a soul back then but bad memories that bring a sigh now. Why should it be that way? Why can’t we change it?

All we have is one life and I think it does not make sense to live it for others unless you are absolutely sure that you want to do it that way. Run to your first love.

During lunch, a friend told me about another who had a deep passion to become an architect but took up electronics and then went on take up a position in the software services industry. She still retains her passion for architecture but quite unfortunately post graduate courses in architecture require a undergraduate degree in architecture or at least in civil engineering. I wrote this post when I came back from lunch.

This is a conversation between my friend and me at lunch today. Needless to say, the conversation might not reflect either of our belief systems.

Absolute Truth

“You need to get out of the Matrix.”

“How will I know that the thing that I get into, after I get out of the Matrix, is not another Matrix?”

“That’s what happens in the movie. Sion was another system.”

“So, Morpheus completely wasted Neo’s time.”

“Maybe it is like this: You come out of the Matrix and then get out of the outer Matrix and so on. Each generation hands over the baton to the other. You need to find the absolute truth.”

“Absolute Truth? What is absolute truth? How can something be absolute?”

“Let me define it this way: The absolute truth is that the absolute truth exists.”

“How do you prove that this is the absolute truth and it is true?”

“You are right. Then let me redefine absolute truth: The absolute truth is that there exists an absolute truth for which no proof exists…”

“I had once thought on a similar problem. How do you prove a theorem whose statement is: This theorem cannot be proved.”

“Let’s see. If the statement is true, the theorem holds. If the statement is false, the theorem can be proved. That’s a contradiction. If the theorem is true, well, it can not be proved. Hmm…”

“Hmm…”

Proof For God

“Well, Ramanujam did not need a proof for the existence of God. He never bothered about rigorous proofs, even in mathematics.”

“Hmm…”

“However, many mathematicians did not believe in God. There is no proof.”

“You don’t need a proof to show that God exists. That is why it is called ‘faith’. Do you believe that George Bush exists?”

“Yes. I have not seen him. But there is an experiment to prove whether he exists or not, which might involve travelling to White House and verifying it.”

“I can give you an experiment which will establish that God exists. You need to be a good person. And after you die, you will be resurrected on the day of Judgement and you will get to meet him.”

“But I need a proof that God exists in this life time.”

“I think it would be unfair to add restrictions like this. What if I say that you cannot travel out of the country yet you need to establish the fact that George Bush exists?”

“I will meet him when he comes here.”

“When you die, you will have a concious thought. When you die and you are resurrected on the day of judgement, your next conscious thought will be in the presence of God.”

“But how do I see him here?”

“He is everywhere. He is omnipresent. Different people have different ways of talking about God. Let me stick to the Christian version. You cannot see God because you are sinful. God is sinless and therefore you cannot exist in his presence.”

“Hmm…”

“I have a problem with people asking for a proof for God. You can choose to believe in God or you can choose not to. But why do you need a proof? Isn’t it called ‘faith’?” (Pulls out his cellphone) “In the Bible, faith is defined as the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

“Hardy conjectured that God does not exist and he believed his conjecture to be true.”

“Rene Descartes came up with a syllogism to show that the supernatural does exist.”

Origin of Mathematics

“The beauty of mathematics is that it works with axioms we have chosen. We choose some axioms which we believe to be true and use these axioms to prove other facts called theorems. In Physics, these basic axioms are hidden from us. We hypothesize laws to explain the universe.”

“Regardless of the question on whether mathematics would exist or not in platonic world, I think mathematics can be possible only as a result of our interaction with the universe.”

“That’s fine. We can have a philosophical debate over that. But here, I am explaining why we can rely on the mathematical proofs more than the laws of physics. The laws of physics can be modified or changed, when we discover something new which is not consistent with the laws.”

“I would like to conduct a psychological experiment. Say, we create a neural electronic interface in which the environment presented to the human is just a plain landscape with a grid on it. Will the person come up with numbers?”

“If there is a grid, there are squares.”

“I wanted a grid to give the sensation of movement. If there is no grid, he might not have the sense of motion.”

“And if there is motion, he would be able to know speed.”

“But will he be able to come up with numbers? I see two trees now. I count them. Then I see three of them. I add it and come up with addition. Will you be able to come up numbers in such a landscape?”

“Hmm….. This brings a question in my mind. Can there be a life where mathematics is different from ours? Where, they can predict the next prime intuitively? We have a limitation. We cannot distinguish between areas as easily as we do with lengths. For example, I have a grid of 2 X 5 stones and another grid of 4 X 3 stones. How will you say which one is bigger just by observing the area they cover?”

“Hmm…”

“I wonder how mathematics would have evolved if we had that ability. In many factorization problems, this ability can be used to solve some problems.”

“You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you’re finished, you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird… So let’s look at the bird and see what it’s doing — that’s what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.”

I know what an Higg’s particle is. I have done some elementary reading on it. I have watched Brian Cox’s presentation on the LHC at TED. I have read the SCIAM article “The Coming Revolutions in Particle Physics”. I know enough about the Higg’s particle to sound learned and impressive at the lunch table. Maybe even to the extent of being able to regurgitate a bit at a barcamp.

But will it be ever the same as getting down to the bowels of quantum mechanics and arriving at the particle mathematically? Will it ever equal at arriving at the big equation of everything and finding that you will have to introduce the big ‘H’ to make it work? Sometime this year, I got a piece of good advice: “Don’t be a quizzer”. Being a avid quizzer myself, I know exactly what the person was talking about. Quizzers know a lot of stuff - history, geography, economics, current affairs, arts, the sciences – and most of it is superficial, or should I say “partial”.

I am not a quantum physicist or even a physicist. Maybe I need not know more than what I know currently about the Higg’s particle. Neither does a zoologist need to know about “the pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization” nor does a historian need to know about “advanced Fourier series” or “organic chemistry”. But in this day and age of Wikipedia and Google, does a “zoologist” even need to know his Chordata from his Annelida?

Being a polymath is different from being continuous partial. A polymath has in-depth knowledge of more than one field. A “continuous partial” has superficial knowledge in one too many fields. It is also a different matter to try out one’s hand at different fields to fall in love and become an expert in one of them. A “continuous partial” does not fall in love but rather continues to acquire partial knowledge throughout his lifetime. The entire idea is beautifully summed up in the statement by Richard Feynman which appears at the beginning of this blog.

So, is being “continuous partial” when it comes to knowledge, good or bad? The jury is still out on this one!

“Is there a number on your phone that you can call when you are in the worst time of your life, say, maybe when you are thinking of ending it youself?” “Is there a person who knows what you are, your dreams and aspirations and can predict your thoughts and actions?” “Is there a person who challenges your principles and ideals not because he wants to have fun arguing or engage in some intellectual masturbation but is concerned that you might be doing something wrong?”

“Do you have any friends who are not continuous partial?”

I first came across the the adjective “continuous partial” in Robert Scoble’s blog about breathing less while emailing and twittering. I fell in love with it immediately. It perfectly described many concepts that were floating around in my mind at that time. Linda Stone, the person who coined the term, uses it to describe attention and relationships. I now use it to describe knowledge as well. Continuous partial knowledge - knowledge which fails to go in-depth. I will save the details for another post. I liked the term so much that it has now become part of my vocabulary and I use it quite frequently!

I don’t read philosophy or management. In fact, I don’t read pretty much anything except textbook science. (I will save my crazy theory on reading only textbooks for another post.) All the philosophy and management that I pout are reflections during travel. When I come back to my computer, I put down my thoughts in words as either a blog or enter them into my log book. And I give it a title and the tile is used to refer to the idea. For example, “microcosm theory” refers to my idea on the loss of individuality in large companies and how it affects policies, “too many eggs” refers to my economic theory and so on and so forth.

Sometimes, I have found that my ideas already have formal names in philosophy and management. Once I find them, I tend to use the formal terms rather than my cooked up inventions. I would love to quote a few examples but I have no recollections of how I refered to my ideas before I actually found out that they are referred to as “Objectivism” and “Determinism”.

I agree. Jargon is intimidating. Just imagine if I was at a lunch table and I suddenly used the term “continuous partial” in the conversation! People might be offended outright. But then, I sometimes wonder that if my words really meant anything to the people at the table, they would ask me to explain the jargon. And in reply, I might either decide to explain the idea or ask folks to google it out or locate it in my blog. I guess it makes sense to do the former when an understanding of the term is necessary for the conversation to proceed.

Jargon saves time. Once a jargon is understood, you spend a fraction of the time to transmit an idea. I was recently interviewed by a person at work who was interested in finding out what motivates folks. Instead of a long rant, I sent her a list of links to my blog posts. Why waste time when you have already  spent enough on expressing your ideas? Similarly, why waste time explaining an idea when a term for it has already been invented? When one word would do, why waste energy and time on a hundred?

Well, I leave it to my readers to add, subtract, multiply or divide my thoughts on jargon. Stay tuned for my posts on “continuous partial knowledge”, “conditioning by books” and “random self mutating premise generators“.

]]> http://wesleyneo.wordpress.com/2008/06/29/an-ode-to-jargon/feed/ W http://wesleyneo.wordpress.com/2008/06/26/yet-another-belief-system/ http://wesleyneo.wordpress.com/2008/06/26/yet-another-belief-system/#comments Thu, 26 Jun 2008 13:44:05 +0000 wesleyneo http://wesleyneo.wordpress.com/?p=354

I was speaking to a very religious friend of mine while walking back from church.

Me: “Hey, You need to see Christopher Hitchen’s talk at Google.”

“Who is he?”

“He is the author of the book ‘God is not great’”

“I don’t think he is worthy of my time.”

I was born a Christian in a land where Christians are in the minority. As it happens, folks are better at what they are when they are in the minority. Both my parents are devout Christians and work in a Christian organization. I have been exposed to the intricate details of how Christianity works as I have relatives across almost all major denominations from the Catholics to the Pentecostals.

It is .9:11 in the morning. I am supposed to be taking a look at collaborative knowledge engineering. Instead, I am sitting here with Microsoft Word open and writing a blog. Why? Because something caught my eye and caused a stack overflow in my brain. This thought has been simmering in my mind for a long time and I am so overwhelmed now that I cannot but put it down in words.

In the talk which Christopher Hitchens delivered at Google, he seems to make an assertion that somehow religion is the root cause of all violence in the world. Well, that is Mr. Christopher’s belief and I will save my arguments against it for later. What struck me while I watched the video was the fact that his statement echoes a similar argument that theists use - that somehow atheism is the root cause of all evil in the world (The sentiment is also echoed by Ben Stein’s movie ‘Expelled’).

I use a technique of argument for which I do not have a name (I have been told that it is a concept in Sociology). It is similar to the evaluation that I do for my principles: “If every member of the human species were to follow the action or an idea and there would be no harm in the propagation of the species, the thought or the action is good.”If I were to use this to argue with Mr. Hitchens, I would ask him whether violence would disappear from the planet if everybody in this world were to abandon religion. In a similar vein, I would also ask Mr. Stein whether violence and evil disappear from this world if everybody became Christians.

It also irritated me that no one at Hitchen’s talk even dared to challenge the propositions that he made. This leads me to believe that adoption of belief systems (theism or atheism) is determined by cultural and environmental influences. A believer in evolution would definitely feel out of place in a church or conservative school as much as a devout Christian would feel out of place and overwhelmed in a liberal institute of higher learning. Speaking about influences of environment, it is worthwhile mentioning that it is fashionable at my work place to strut around with a copy of “Atlas Shrugged” or “Fountain Head”.

I was surprised to find a section titled “Convert’s Corner” at Richard Dawkin’s website. I was quite amused since I thought it was only theists who took pride in parading converts. Well, I was wrong. Both sides seem to use similar tactics!

The point made above also reminds me of the clamour to find the religious views of a person when he becomes famous or does significant work. I dropped in at Ray Kurzweil’s Wikipedia page and found a section titled “Stance on Religion”. Why would anybody be interested in his stance on religion? And why would it matter anyway? Would the value of his work be diminished? Both atheists and theists engage in this absolutely disgusting practice.

All these factors have led me to believe that atheism is no different from theism - it is just another belief system. It uses the same tactics that any other belief system uses. And both recruit adherents by cultural, environmental and personal influence.

And what caused me to write this blog? There used to be a time when bad astronomer Phil Plait wrote excellent, well researched articles on space exploration and astronomy. But of late, his blog contain less of the two and more of fundamentalist atheism. Sigh! And it beats me on why SCIAM India needs to contain non science columns by Michael Shermer. And of late, I have been either sleeping or scribbling math on paper at church - the folks simply fail to answer the important questions or dig deeper.

Wake up folks! Open your eyes and see that your supposed ideological enemies engage in the same tactics as you do. Live with the fact that you will never wake up to a morning to find a world full of theists or atheists. There is a lot more that one can do than engage in this mindless and distasteful bickering!

I am now going back to my quest for Singularity.

PS: Trying hard to find out what my stance on religion is an exercise in futility. And I prefer it remains that way.

My friend Susam and me just got back from a performance by Nakul Shenoy. The performance reminded me of an entry that I had made in my log book when I was in college. It has been reproduced here.

12 - December - 2005 8:49 AM

… Last week, for the first time in my life, I saw a snake charmer. He was at Lenavilaku and I was walking there to have my breakfast. There was a small crowd around him and he had two well grown cobras with him. The snake charmer was an entertainer, a snake handler, a psychiatrist and a spiritualist. At each stage, he filtered out people and brought the chosen ones closer to him. (I stood there amazed at his performance.) His talk was well oiled and polished and highly convincing to the unprepared mind.

His statements were of the form: “I want you to do X not because of Y but because of Z.” X could be giving out money or believing in the powers of a stick that he claimed had magical powers.

He was a psychoanalyst of the best sorts. He looked at a frail young man and said, “You have been cheated by close ones.” He said to an old guy, “You have not seen the fruits of your hands.” To a well dressed man with glasses on, “You are expecting a promotion soon!” And there people actually believed him!!

He was absolutely amazing. His performance and his talk was smooth. I wanted to give him some money - not because I believed in him but for his skill and to feed the snakes. Assuming he visits three villages each work day and works for four days in a week, consider this: He earned Rs. 250 in the single hour he spent at Lenavilaku.

Susam was very interested to take part in one of the acts. When the final act was on, he put his hand up when Nakul wanted someone on the stage. He saw Susam with his hand up and called him up to the stage saying, “You have been calling out ‘Nakul’ for a long time”. He asked Susam to pick a book from a stack of four. He then asked him to turn to a random page and focus on the first word of the page. He later correctly guesses that the word was “I”.

The believers will believe and the skeptics will be skeptical. First of all, Susam did not focus on the first word but rather the second word which was “could”. Secondly, the real psychic would have been able to read the mind from a really random book, like one of the two SCIAM magazines that were in my bag, open to a random page and then try and find the word. I wonder whether he would have been able to get either “Large Hadron Collider” or “Solar Farms” correctly. Thirdly, Susam was not calling out his name for a long time. In fact, he never raised his voice during the entire show.

Having said that, I must say that it was a brillaint performance by Nakul the “psychic”, corporate version of the the low cost rural version of 2005. I wish Susam had lied or turned the page when Nakul had his back to him.

For some reason, I have a strong dislike of esoteric knowledge. The idea that knowledge, or at least certain kinds of knowledge, is in the preserve of certain people does not seem right to me. Was it Einstein or Feynman who said, “If you can’t explain it to your grandmother, you haven’t understood enough” If there is one reason that knowledge (or some of it) continues to be esoteric, it is in the inability of communication. So, I am going to try my best in communicating the ideas that have been traversing through my thought streams in the recent past.

When I was in the fourth semester, I had a paper which on electrical engineering and control systems. Out of the five chapters, the last two were on control systems while the rest were on electrical engineering. That would be my brief, very brief, brush with control systems. For those who are reading this and are not familiar with control systems, let me make a brief attempt at explaining it. The area of control systems deals with the study of the response of a system to one or more inputs. Control systems attempt to study how various parameters in the system can affect the system. For example, we can study how the system would react if the parameters influenced it one after the other (in series) or all at the same time (in parallel). Feedback mechanisms, in which the response produced is looped back to the system, is also analyzed.

One of the most common examples used in the study of control systems is that of a surface to air missile. Once the initial co-ordinates of an enemy target are acquired, these are fed to the missile and launched. Once in the air, the missile might use its own radar or ground based radar systems to continuously receive information on the enemy target. This information is used for guidance to reach the target. This would be a good example for a feedback mechanism. The radar data is continuously used to change the course of the missile towards the target.

It was quite unusual of my friend to quietly listen to crap talk. I was quite amused and mentioned this to his wife. That was when she told me that the producer of the “crap talk” was a patient at psychiatry. I sank to the bottom of my car seat. “She was a brilliant student. But she did not clear a few papers even after repeated attempts in the final semester. So they brought her here. Initial tests showed that she had very low levels of potassium and other chemicals”, another friend told me later. Can the presence or absence of chemicals cause changes in human behaviour? If you were to speak to people on hormone replacement therapy, they would have at least one incident in which they underwent emotional and psychological turmoil when they missed a shot or allowed their hormone levels to drop (or increase).

Neuroscience is a fascinating science. Though our understanding of the human brain is miniscule, the existing knowledge tells us that the brain is a complex biological and chemical entity. Well, the word “biological” seems redundant because on a molecular level, the brain is just another chemical system. The brain might be much more complex that the most complex chemical industrial process that man has ever designed but it is impossible to deny the fact that it is a chemical system which is subject to physical laws (as deduced from our understanding of the observable universe).

When we feel happy or sad or have any of the variety of emotions available, chemicals are being produced in the brain. These chemicals cause physiological and biochemical changes in the body which express these emotions. Every stimulus from every sense re-arranges some part in the complex chemistry. When we think, we fire thousands of neurons. When we take decisions or reason or exhibit intelligence, the essence of the species, thousands and maybe even millions of molecules are being synthesised, broken down and transported through the one and half kilograms of matter that we call the human brain.

Of the hundreds of people I have met in my life, I consider it blessed to have met a few. These folks have made a huge impact in my life and in my thought. And one of those would be a medical student from across the eastern sea. If someone were to do a comparison between both of us, there would be nothing much in common except for the interest in education and technology. While he is a conservative and faithful student of the Bible, I am a liberal rationalizing idiot. (I still have no idea how he manages to put up with me in spite of all the philosophical crap that I heap on him. That also reminds me of another friend who puts up with me.) In a particularly long phone call with him, I made a statement, ” Everybody behaves the way they behave as a result of their upbringing and environment.” The importance of the statement that I made did not strike me as important during the phone call but later I realised that I had just obliterated free will!!

I liked to study people. I used to do it for two reasons. First, it enabled me to help them with their problems (in case I had to help them with their problems and they allowed me to help them with their problems). Secondly, it helped me get work done. In college, I began to notice patterns in behaviour. People behaved more or less in the same way. And since the study of human behaviour is something that interests me, I began to formulate theories. The theories were constantly tested against real world behaviour and were constantly revised.

In a way, we all do this sub-consciously. Geeks behave in such and such way. Manchester United fans behave in such and such way. Khasi behave in such and such way. The Chinese, the British, the Americans, and the Pakistanis - we all have our mental pictures created. These pictures are created from our interactions in person or through different media like books, anecdotes, stories and news.

And I was good. In the first five minutes, I am evaluating the person. At the end of the five minutes, he or she has been classified into the many categories of my theories. If they have not been classified, they are being further evaluated to ascertain characteristics which will then be used to remodel the theories. And I was very good. So, was the MBA going to be in marketing or human resources?

Have you ever had a friend who thought in the exact same way as you did? Well, I have one. And so it happened that we never used to talk to each other. It was for the simple reason that we each knew how we were going to respond to each of the statements. The entire conversation would be played out in our heads. And when we met each other, everything was just understood and it was all silence. But the question nagging me was too big for me and so I called him. “If i-Inc (Intelligence Inc, a pipe dream of ours that continues to be a pipe dream and seems to have a high probability of being a pipe dream forever) were a reality, you will be in Personnel.” - I didn’t see this one coming!

More than physical or chemical determinism, I have come to strongly believe in psychological determinism. A person is sum total of his experiences. Everything that happens in his life influences his behaviour in the future. From his birth, he is influenced by parents, relatives, neighbours, friends and teachers, colleagues at work, men and women of history, religious leaders and strangers around him.

Can human behaviour be viewed as a control system? Can it be viewed as a system which has a very large number of inputs, feedback mechanisms and produce behaviour as an output (And behaviour is in fact a response to stimuli)? The system might be huge and our understanding of it might be very small. Yet, I see no reason why the model should be in trouble. If this was the case, the species existence can be thought of interactions between various control systems, which turn makes one huge control system. Can cause and effect explain everything that happens around us and our own behaviour? Has it all been determined? Is free will an illusion?

There is somebody out there who is undergoing the same trials and tribulations as you are. If you are lucky, you will meet them in your life time and you will sit, talk a lot and feel at peace. If not, woe unto you. I got lucky. And as we discussed everything under the sun, the word “exploitation” popped up. If an understanding of the strengths and weakness of human behaviour was used, wasn’t it exploitation? Wouldn’t the person with the greatest understanding be the best marketer to peddle goods and the best manager to get work done?

“Can you show God?”

“It is an experience. It is hope. It is faith.”

“What if it is a hallucination?”

“That would make it causal!”

Need I tell that to that old lady at Patna who hugged the stone dear when she declared, “Ram is my father! Ram is my mother!”, with the happiness of a million smiles? Need I tell it to the mother, who with unshakable faith prays daily with the Bible in her hand, for her son to be cured of the congenital disease? Need I tell it to the poor muezzin who faithfully puts aside some money for Hajj? Need I tell it to atheist turned theist who could not find any explanation on why his baby cried all night except in the science of spirituality? Need I tell it to the theist turn atheist who abhorred the hypocrisy of the youth leader who sexually abused him at camp? Need I tell that to the agnostic who did not want any of the trouble?

That was about them. What about you? You may choose to accept it. You may choose to reject it. You may choose to ignore it. Whatever you do, you action would be a sum total of your past and present and maybe even your future.

“How about pasta for breakfast?”

“What is the state of your mind?”

When I was speaking to you (before), I made a remark “You are human”. Do you remember that?

Yes.

Why is that? How can you deal with raw emotions, so human? So un-mathematical, un-calculatable?

Hmm?

Unquantifiable.

Oh, it can be quantified. Like “I love you infinitely” or “I hate that man infinitely” or “I have zero feelings for you”.

And at 2319 hours on the 07th of May 2008, I was in the most poetic moment of my life.

“Don’t ever give me that evolutionary biology crap. Why? If all of us were to think on those lines, none of us would be sitting here, having snacks and tea, talking absolute nonsense and pulling each other’s leg.

“Are you sitting here continuously evaluating the usefulness of the conversation that we are having? Are you calculating the time that we are spending every evening, analyzing it statistically to understand how much of it is useful or not? Does it disturb you that you are in a cornucopia of uselessness when you have could done better things with your time? As far as I can see, none of us, except for the idiot that is me, is doing it.

“Why are we even having tea together? We just met a couple of months back. I did not even know who you were, until recently. As for the others, I have at least had some sort of interaction with them before I came to this city. Why the hell are we doing this then? Was it in some probability that we all calculated that we would might be useful to each other in the future? The future!? The future is inaccessible! But yet, we meet every day. Look at the guy. All that he does for a ‘living’ is to pull my leg! Yet, there is that small unexpected ping asking about my welfare or the phone call at midnight to say “Hi”.

“And yes, why did you ping me about my wrists right now when I was writing this? Why do you care? Am I stupid enough to not take measures? Or is it that you have already gone through the pain and don’t want me to go through the same thing again? Is it that you are concerned? And why do all the others keep telling you to take care of your ulcer? Is it that they are concerned? What kind of emotion is that – so human and so seemingly unnecessary? Who are we to each other that we need to be concerned about each other?

“It is not only about people sitting at this table. There are a lot of people out there – who have taken time off to talk to me, be concerned, help me make sense of life and take the tough decisions. Why were they doing it? Who asked them to do it? Who am I to them?

“Maybe we are just a bunch of people feeding off each other for emotional support to maintain sanity. Maybe, and just maybe, we are not.

“Don’t ever give me that evolutionary biology crap again. Forgive me, I am a complete idiot. Yet, you will have tea with me tomorrow. And we will continue to talk uselessness and laugh at all the silly jokes we make.

I will have one chocolate doughnut.”

It was a typical day in a typical project in a typical IT services company in India. The team was building a warehouse inventory management system for a medium size wholesaler in Europe. The application was built using a forms-based system. When the offshore project manager opened his inbox in the morning, he found out that design team had come up with an idea of building a Java applet which would display the floor plan of the warehouse, thus making it easier for the end-user. The applet, which was to be based on Swing, was to be completed in three weeks.

After acknowledging the request, the project manager decided to entrust the task to Ashish and Benny. Neither of them had any prior experience in Swing but they had a reputation of “getting work done”. On receiving their new assignment, Ashish and Benny set out to work. They both read the requirements thoroughly and sat down together to discuss for a few minutes. And then, they took different paths.

Ashish headed to the library to pick up a book¹ on Swing. He spent the next week reading about the Swing architecture and its capabilities. He built small programs during this period to understand the various possibilities of Swing. During the second week, Ashish started building generic classes which he felt would help in finishing his part of the task. He also felt that some of the classes might be reusable in other projects and therefore he was careful to make them as generic as possible. He started putting the code together on the first day of the third week.

As with Ashish, Benny built a mental image of the code in his mind as soon as he read the requirements. He soon found himself googling for code samples using the keywords which the mental image of the code had given him. On obtaining the code samples, he went through the code to understand it. In case he did not understand something, he made small changes and executed the program to see what would change. By the start of the second week, Benny started putting together the code for the task. And by the end of the second week, he was able to produce something which resembled the required output.

Which approach is better? Ashish or Benny.

I have left out the conclusions in the descriptions above. It is my intention to raise a number of questions which project managers and strategists need to look at. The answer to this question might have a large impact on the working of the IT industry. It has the potential to change project management, training practices and on the long run, even hiring could change.

Do the approaches have an impact on the various parameters of a software project?

From the perspective of the organization, if the manager was under pressure to get the code working within the required time limit, without giving due importance to any other parameter, it wouldn’t matter to the manager as long as the task is completed on time and gets cleared by QA (assuming that QA is also under pressure). On a hunch, I feel that Ashish’s code might be more robust and might get through QA in lesser number of iterations. However, there is a possibility that the approach might take longer than the allocated development time. Any time overruns might be offset time for QA, if the code is robust as I assumed.

If the manager is concerned about other parameters like code quality, it would be interesting to understand whether the approaches have any bearing on the different parameters.

What about the long term effects of the approaches?

As Ashish has obtained foundational knowledge in Swing, would he be faster and more efficient in a future project that requires Swing? Or is it not really worthwhile to put in the extra effort, as the knowledge would fade away with time? In the interesting world of IT services, there is a probability that either Ashish or Benny might never ever work on Swing again. There is also a probability that they might work on Swing again. If that is the case, the effect of the approaches would have a large impact on efficiency. So, the questions that organizations have to deal with are threefold:

1. What is the knowledge retaining capacity of humans? How often does one needs knowledge to be refreshed?

2. Does a particular approach make someone more efficient when it comes to a similar task in a future project?

3. If the bearing on the efficiency is definitive, what steps must an organization take to promote the approach?

For an individual, do the approaches have an impact?

Last week, my team had a meeting to decide on the “efficiency” of each of the approaches. When I walked out of the meeting, I decided to write a blog on the approaches. Quite interestingly, a lot of related discussion sprang up on blogosphere. In his blog, Doug writes,

“I learn in tiny nuggets, and I only learn the stuff that gets me to the next step in a project. If I’m working on a project and I need to figure out how to pull in an RSS feed into a flex app then that’s exactly what I want to learn, and only that. Once I get stuck at another point then I’ll go and figure out what I need to get past that point.”

There is a difference between the approaches mentioned by Doug and the question that we are trying to answer here. During the course of the project, both Ashish and Benny might do what Doug writes in the paragraph quoted above. Our question deals with what one should do when starting off on a new technology (or concept). Should one read up the basic information on Swing (or Flex in Doug’s case)?

Though, Jeff in his blog, provides a lot of deep insight for programmers, it does not deal with this question directly. The advice on the blog is more about building generic expertise in programming (which is not dependent on any particular language or technology).

To make the question clearer, let me make an attempt to provide an analogy. If you are asked to learn to drive a car within a specified time, does it make sense to spend some time and effort to learn rudimentary ideas about internal combustion engines, gearboxes and brakes? It is entirely possible to drive a car without knowing about anything under the hood. But does having the basic knowledge help in anyway?

Is the question valid?

On a final thought, it is also necessary to look at whether the question is valid. Though this is probably the first question to be answered, I moved it to the end with a purpose. An answer of “No” might create a bias while dealing with the other three questions.

Maybe, it is impossible for people to change their approach thus invalidating the question itself. Or to put it in another way, it is just a difference of how people work and it really does not matter as long as the goal is accomplished. But if the question is valid, there is a lot at stake for both organizations and programmers!!

1. It need not be a book in the strictest sense. It could be an introductory article on the web or Sun’s introduction to Swing.

PS: Forgive my long title for the blog.

Yes. Awards do suck. Here are few of the reasons…

Useless Solutions
Some time last year, I was asked by a manger about various content management systems. I asked him about the purpose and he replied that they would use the CMS for interaction and knowledge sharing between technology experts in their unit. It did not make sense to have a separate silo of knowledge when such experts could be spread across different units. It made sense to share the expertise across the organization. Though he did not explicitly state the reasons to me, from the conversation that I had with him, I could figure out the reasons on why he was not so comfortable with the idea.

1. When you set up a separate system, your name gets attached to it. So, for the next appraisal cycle, you get a few points for that. Never mind if the “solution” that you developed, already exists or is not suitable or is not a sustainable model. The target is to get to the next level of the appraisal.

2. In creating independent silos, the unit name gets attached to it. Quite unfortunately, the company wiki (which runs on MediaWiki) does not have a system to pull up statistics based on unit. Managers would be happy to brag about statistics on their unit’s contribution to an initiative.

Some times it might be wiser to attempt a solution at a unit-level before taking it to the level of the organization. However, it does not make sense re-inventing the wheel.

3. Visibility. Someone becomes “famous”!

Creating such independent silos of information does not serve any purpose except for some ego-boost. From the perspective of the organization, it would be a complete waste of time. To conclude the original story, I think they ended up deploying MOSS. I was moved out of the building and never got to know on what happened to the project.

Kill Them
They are called fire-fighters. I know well about them as I was one too. If everything in the project is going wrong, just call the fire-fighter! He/She will come down from heaven, spend day and night looking at your problems and will work their brains off to get the code out to the customer on time. At the end, everybody is happy. The customer is happy. More than that managers are happy - the project was saved and nobody got screwed! And of course, the fire-fighter walks off with an award.

Fire-fighters are the prime reason for continuing incompetency. When something goes wrong, the folks in charge must take the fall for it. Instead, we have these fire-fighters come in and save the day and everybody seems to escape without a scratch. So, nobody pays the price and the cycle of torture and incompetency repeats over and over again. Thejesh said that every project needs a hero. I say, kill them!

Yesterday, I finally sobered up and decided to do some serious reading. So with “Artificial Intelligence - A modern approach“, “Knowledge Management Tools: resources for the economy” on the side and Rachel on my lap, I opened the Wikipedia page for Artificial Intelligence. This is a neatly written page (though one might disagree on certain aspects). Here are two interesting things that I found…

In the section “Knowledge Representation“, the article talks about the qualification problem: “Many of the things people know take the form of “working assumptions.” For example, if a bird comes up in conversation, people typically picture an animal that is fist sized, sings, and flies. None of these things are true about birds in general. John McCarthy identified this problem in 1969 as the qualification problem: for any commonsense rule that AI researchers care to represent, there tend to be a huge number of exceptions. Almost nothing is simply true or false in the way that abstract logic requires.”

From the blog, “No sides. Only questions.”: “These premises are not absolute. They throw open a huge number of other questions. Other problems include definitions.” “These questions again lead to the same conclusion: Human understanding is flawed. It is a quasi-stable set of premises judged on another quasi-stable set of premises.”

The field of AI now takes defines intelligence in terms of rational agents. In the section “Intelligent Agent Paradigm“, the Wikipedia article says, “When the economist’s definition of a rational agent was married to computer science’s definition of an object or module, the intelligent agent paradigm was complete. An intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions which maximizes its chances of success. The simplest intelligent agents are programs that solve specific problems. The most complicated intelligent agents would be rational, thinking human beings.”

I think the definition is in sync with the recent attempt to understand economics and capitalism, “The Case of Too Many Eggs“: “So, what all the people in the world are trying to do is to find innovative ways to put others out of work. From the barter system to high funda stuff like sub-prime mortgages, newer and newer ways to put others out of work are being formed.”

We, as humans, have been trying to answer the same questions! Does it also mean that if everyone had unlimited time in the word, we would come up with every conceivable knowledge? And I am reminded of the quote from Newton, “If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants.” The giants are too tall now-a-days!!

PS: Rachel is my girlfriend - a Dell XPS M1530.

During the course of my under-grad studies, about five to six of my classmates lost a parent. It was almost like we began each semester with a tragic death. And each time, I personally found that I had nothing to say except for silence. And that I could do nothing but stand silently at the corner and give a helping hand when required. And for all the funerals, I just stood there silently - that was the only thing I could do. Do I really know the grief of my friend who has lost his/her parent? I have never been through that experience myself. How then can I offer words of comfort? Does my words mean anything at all? It is easy to say, “I am sorry.” But does that mean anything?

There are many experiences in life, which one can never feel or empathize with until one goes through the same experience. Being there, in that person’s mind and heart, can never replace the emotions of sadness, anger or happiness of any other who has never been through the same experience. With this handicap of never having been through it myself, I write this blog.

Reservation or affirmative action, has always been a tricky issue. On one hand, we have a group of people who were never treated as fellow human beings for thousands of years. And suddenly, we are expecting them to raise from the dust of history and take their place in the society. Is that justifiable? Are sixty years enough to dust away the eons of shame and humiliation?

On the other hand, you have a generation, which is confused on why it is paying for the sins of their fathers. The fathers work at the same place. They both study at the same school. Both families are placed at the same spot on the economic index. But for some unknown reason (as perceived by the other), the person belonging to a particular community gets to a good college! That is unfair!!

How is it possible to balance these two dilemmas? Affirmative action is necessary. But in addition, it is also necessary to ensure that it is fair and that future generations do not continue to bear the burden of past sins. Well, is there a solution for this?

I propose a system of tokens. Every family belonging to the lower classes get two tokens. These tokens can be used only for a single round of reservation. For example, if you use a token for getting a reservation at college, you cannot reuse the token for getting a job (in the public sector of course). Tokens can be passed to the next generation and should expire in two generations. So, here are some of the possible scenarios.

Mr. A gets two tokens when the tokens are allocated. He uses one of those to get a job in the Highway Department and he now has only one remaining token. He has two children and he leaves the token to his younger daughter. The younger daughter is brilliant and does not use the token. Likewise, her children also do not use the token. Since the token, has not been used for two generations, it expires.

Mr. B gets two tokens. He uses one each for his son and daughter to get them into engineering and medicine. The tokens are no longer in the family and have expired.

This is a highly data-intensive system but it is possible. In such a way, we can ensure that justice is done and that the system of reservation does not go on forever. Each generation is considered to be forty years and since the token can be used for at least three generations - they are valid for 120 years! Adding the 60 years that has already gone by, we have a solid 180 years for affirmative action. Scarcity of tokens also means that they will be utilized properly.

Assume that our entire planet consists of only five people - one farmer, one doctor, one architect, one blacksmith and one butcher. There is no money involved in this system and everybody renders their services in exchange for the services received from the other. Let us concentrate on the butcher. He grows five hens. These five hens produce five eggs daily. He consumes one egg and the other four eggs are distributed to the other four. So this system consumes perfectly. He gets sick exactly twice in a year. His house is repaired twice in a year. And he gets food from the farmer every season. Similarly, there is perfect harmony in this system.

This went on for years and years when suddenly another butcher landed from another planet. He had ten hens with him and so he came up with an offer - two eggs instead of the one egg that is now being offered.

* The story is a short analogy of how capitalism works. One person has to lose for another to win. So, there will always be losers. Communism tried to build a system of not having losers by either killing the second butcher or by putting the first butcher on welfare where he gets services for free though he does not render any service. The system failed!

* The butcher from the other planet denotes revolutions (scientific and sociological). And revolutions put people out of work.

* So, what all the people in the world are trying to do is to find innovative ways to put others out of work. From the barter system to high funda stuff like sub-prime mortgages, newer and newer ways to put others out of work are being formed.

* In a system where everyone cannot be a winner, what do we do with the losers?

* Is this a justification for charity? Everybody else in the planet should try and do something for the poor butcher. Or should everyone work more and eat more eggs (from both the butchers)?

Please share your thoughts…

PS: And you wanted to do an MBA to understand these questions? Sheez!

The college which I studied in, was a private institution run by an educational trust. Well, the the trust consisted of the founder’s family and a few close friends. The family ran the entire system as their personal fiefdom. Policies were thrown in at random. Problems were dealt in an ad-hoc manner and the roots causes were rarely dug out. And most importantly, debate on policies were frowned upon. Well, for someone like me, I found the place quite revolting. At some point during those four years, I swore that I will never ever work in a private institution.

But it now it seems that being public had its own set of problems. The organization is forced to listen to whims and fancies of the share holders - for whom, nothing matters but the dividends. The ultimate goal of the organization is now to meet quarterly expectations and give the biggest bang for the buck to it’s shareholders. Tim Malone, writes in his blog, “When management is wrong” (Tech of All Trades, a blog for managers in IT),

“What happened to me? I got fired. Not specifically for this incident at this time, but for several other failures to carry out directives from above. Oh sure, the official word was that my services were no longer needed as we had just completed a large MRP migration project. Nevertheless, I was fired and Harold continued on until his retirement this year.

“I was out of work for six months while I searched for another IT management position. I finally found one and have been happily employed for the last three years. I turned down several offers because I swore I would never work for another publicly held company again. For you middle managers of public companies, I salute you for your thankless job.”

Tim’s company had been through a merger. After doing an excellent job at systems integration, Tim was laid off. This blog was one in a three part series. I encourage you to read all three to get a better perspective of the story. In a recent thread on Google, the same sentiment is expressed.

What goes wrong in public companies? The pressure to meet financial expectations changes the focus of the company from building core competency to making money. In the name of growth, compromises on quality are made. And if it is an IT company, it ends with maintaining its legacy rather than innovate. Comments are the thread share above, indicate that code junkies are now mostly working on the Ad Sense base. Why shouldn’t that be surprising? Isn’t that which gets the most revenue to Google? Being a public company also ties the hands of the management to do something drastic (which would be in the best interests of the company in the long term). Say, for example, to freeze all new hires and set drastic goals to do more work the same population, thereby driving innovation and code quality.

It is not without reason that I call management “the dark side”. I call it the dark side since it involves people. Understanding people and making decisions which keep in mind the best interests of the goal and the myriad different emotions of people is tough. Now imagine dealing with thousands of shareholders!! Michael Johnson, a shareholder, writes some advice for the company that he has invested in. While I read through the article, I felt a bit sad. It was all about money and money. There was nothing about core competency. There was no code quality or re-use. Anyway, why should he be interested at all? He is just a shareholder. As long as the dividends pour in every quarter, why should he be bothered?

Private or Public? I am pretty confused now. What would you do if you start a company? How would you deal with the quality in scalability problem?

In every facet of whatever we do in life, each one of us is trying to achieve something. Let us call it a prize. The main characteristic of this prize is that it is very limited. For example, there are hundreds of theoretical computer scientists out there who are toiling day in and day out. But there is only one Turing Prize which is given