Disastrous Analogies

Munshi Premchand wrote that a salary is like the full moon (which becomes less full with each passing day) whereas business profits are like water from a spring (a steady flow).

While people in the north-eastern states were bearing the brunt of Hurricane Sandy, I was sitting at home thinking of the San Andreas fault line and its potential for causing earthquakes. I was in Houston when Rita struck. We were very fortunate that what could have been a category 5 storm that was headed right towards the city weakened and moved away in the last 24 hours. A day before the hurricane hit, we tried to drive to Austin. But so did half of Houston. The other half was driving to Dallas. No one got anywhere that day. We weren't even able to go to the Houston airport to pick up my dear friend and roommate Sampad who had just flown in with his newlywed wife.

Which is worse, an earthquake or a hurricane? I don't think the question has an answer, but I was having hiccups while pondering the question. The hiccups inspired me to the following analogy: A hurricane is like a sneeze (you can feel it coming) whereas an earthquake is like a hiccup (you know it will come, but can't time it exactly). When it comes to major natural disasters, I think most people would prefer sneezes to hiccups.

Meeting Professor Ray

Professor Ajoy Kumar Ray, who is currently the Vice Chancellor of BE College (now known as Bengal Engineering and Science University or BESU), Shibpur, was one of my mentors at IIT-Kharagpur. We have remained in touch after my graduation, and I decided to pay him a visit on my recent trip to India.

Prof. Ray is one of the nicest people I know, and meeting him is always a pleasure; however, I was also curious for a different reason. Before joining BE College (his alma mater) as Vice Chancellor in 2009, Prof. Ray used to teach in IIT. In those days, BE College was thought of as a college on the decline with a long proud past. Among other things, there was too much student unrest, which inevitably shifts the focus away from education. Since Prof. Ray joined, the college has made a remarkable turnaround, and in recent months the media has been showering glowing praise on the college. I wanted to learn how the change was brought about.

Many steps were taken to address the politicization of the student body. Underlying all of them, there were a few basic realizations. First, students have a lot of energy that must be channelled somewhere. In the absence of creative and constructive channels, student unrest is to be expected. Second, students, like any other group, have unique problems that need to be addressed. I had heard that shortly after joining BE College, Prof Ray had joined the students in a game of cricket - a fine way to bond with a bunch of youngsters. Such actions can quickly clear up the air of mistrust so that constructive change can begin. I believe that much more was done to address student needs, but lack the details. To quell my curiosity on how to reduce politics, Prof. Ray himself gave the following example. Suppose that the college elects a student soccer secretary each year. One might allow all students to vote to choose who it should be, in which case representatives of opposing political parties field their candidates and organize the campaigns. If we modify the system so that only those who play soccer vote to choose the soccer secretary, then that dramatically reduces the involvement of transigent individuals with sworn affiliations to political parties. Through the creation of various sports, social and cultural clubs, and by encouraging the participation of students in these clubs, an attempt can be made to channel student energy into creative activities. Simple but powerful steps towards reform. I was very impressed.

During the last half-hour of my stay, Prof. Ray and I went for a walk. He showed me an old clock tower which was powered by water, and had been broken for decades before being fixed recently. There are few such clocks in India, and to repair it, a technician had to be summoned from a different state (finding such a technician was the first challenge). He also showed me a pond with a paved path running along its side, lined with bright lights powered by nearby solar panels. On one side of the lake was a very fine nine-foot bronze statue of Rabindranath Tagore. Five years ago, none of this existed. As a passer-by remarked, the place used to be like Sundarban (a forest) - light from a few flickering incandecent bulbs from a road in the distance being the only barrier to total darkness.

Again I was curious, what did Prof. Ray do that others did not? He explained that BE College is a government-run institution, which has pros and cons. Money given to the college is carefully accounted for, which prevents outright theft. On the other hand, to spend money - even a few hundred dollars - tenders must be issued and quotes must be invited, the best quote chosen, and the task overseen and completed. The cost of this bureaucracy and red tape is high, both in terms of time and money. To get around the problem, Prof. Ray worked with a few prominent donors, and asked them to give not in cash but in kind. One company might donate the bronze statue, another may provide the lights, etc. The contributors' names appear on a stone tablet that stands next to the pond.

He similarly took steps to encourage research, of which I did not seek details. But research funding has gone from Rs. 3 crores/yr when he joined to Rs. 65 crores/yr. I can totally believe that he took some simple steps that made an enormous difference.

On the downside, overwork and the stress of dealing with individuals set in old ways has taken a toll on Prof. Ray's health. I believe that he drinks too much tea, his meals are irregular, and he has not set aside time for exercise or its equivalent. I hope he remains healthy and lives a long life. Such people are rare.

Free speech

Confidence without understanding in speech is like power without responsibility in action.

Customer vs. Steve Jobs

Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company once said:

"If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse."

his point being that it is possible to meet customer needs better than customers can envision.

Steve Jobs embraced the above philosophy. In 1985, he was quoted as saying:

“We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn’t build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren’t going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build.”

This was shortly after he was fired from Apple.

Now, here's a quote from 2000:
“This is what customers pay us for–to sweat all these details so it’s easy and pleasant for them to use our computers. We’re supposed to be really good at this. That doesn’t mean we don’t listen to customers, but it’s hard for them to tell you what they want when they’ve never seen anything remotely like it. Take desktop video editing. I never got one request from someone who wanted to edit movies on his computer. Yet now that people see it, they say, ‘Oh my God, that’s great!’”

Same content, but there is one very important difference. The customer may not be able to see Henry Ford's vision of a car, but when presented with a car, the customer must agree that the car is better than a horse, even a faster one. The Steve that returned to Apple in 1996 showed far greater respect for this fact that the Steve that had been fired in 1984.

Two doctors and a patient

In a town, there are two doctors and only one patient who is a drug addict. After a particularly bad seizure, the addict goes to one of the doctors. The doctor knows that the addict should be checked into rehab, but also foresees that since rehab is frustrating, the addict will likely switch doctors. Hence, the doctor, acting to avoid the loss of his only patient, administers to the addict a large dose of his own drug to restore the semblance of normalcy. In this way, the doctor buys time to implement a better long-term treatment plan. The other doctor is vocal in his criticism of the treatment method, although one might conjecture that had the patient gone to him instead, events would have unfolded with broad similarity while differing in details.

The analogy with the two-party system and the US economy is imperfect. If the above were to happen, the patient would ultimately die. The US economy will merely be reborn at some point. A part of me would like to believe that a long-term cure can be found for the excessive debt that has accumulated, but experts everywhere seem to not deny that debt has simply changed hands, not disappeared. The best outcome that I can think of is one where the dollar smoothly devalues, in the process reducing the effective sovereign debt burden, and also boosting exports. But a major economic adjustment such as this is unlikely to be without hiccups.

Debt signifies that tomorrow's spending was done yesterday, and in a zero-sum game we must spend less sometime in the future. Since we spent more yesterday, the economy did better than it would have. To quote Kenneth Fisher "Historically, big deficits are followed by stock-market returns that are dramatically superior to those following surpluses--for as long as 36 months out." When the time comes, stock market returns will be less than dramatic as the US government, which directly or indirectly is a big customer of the US economy, will have gone from spender to the opposite. Whether spending will reduce because of higher taxes or fewer public entitlements is something that the two doctors can debate ad infinitum.

Choosing the right animal

A donkey is an inefficient horse. It is smaller, weaker, slower. But that a horse is an inefficient donkey is more revealing, because it is less expected. You see, a donkey has certain traits that are valuable in certain contexts - it is a dull, docile, complying animal.

So if a dhobi (washerman) needs a donkey to carry his pile of laundry to the dhobi-ghat (place by the side of a water body where clothes are washed), then it is a donkey that he must buy. If instead he buys an animal from a sale on race-horses who fell short of racing standards, then the next morning the whole village will watch with a mix of bewilderment, amusement and pity as an out-of-breath dhobi chases a trotting horse with a pile of clothes falling off its back.

Fairness over Equality

In an episode of the TV medical drama 'House', a patient of African origin is offended when the doctor tells him that a certain drug works better on blacks than on whites. He is offended because he knows that we are all equal; the difference is only skin deep.

The notion of equality is widely perceived as positive - as an antidote to discrimination.'Everyone is equal' is a simple idea anyone can grasp, whether they agree or not. Clearly everyone is not equal in the mathematical sense of equality, since if you can tell two people apart then they cannot be equal. But more importantly, I think that this oversimplified axiom prevents the more correct and more important idea of 'fairness' from finding the visibility that is due.

In a world where everyone is equal, tolerance is trivialized. Tolerance is hard. If we were zebras in the Serengeti, our survival would depend critically on the ability to generalize the behavior of one lion to all lions. A broadminded zebra who thought – “I should treat this lion as an individual, even though the last one chewed up my cousin” – would quickly end up as lunch. The ability to generalize is naturally hardwired into the parts of our brain that we have inherited from our ancestors of millions of years ago.

Unfortunately, humans tend to generalize by force of habit along lines that are not fundamental. Most of us here have had no choice in determining our religion, race, nationality etc. but are nonetheless attached to such identities strongly. When our country is insulted, we feel insulted, even though we are citizens simply because, through no choice or fault of our own, we found ourselves there when we first opened our eyes at birth. Every country, religion, race has people who would feel less insecure if people of other similarly accidentally acquired identities were wiped out. Zebras would feel less insecure if lions and other harmless animals that resemble lions could be exterminated.

Tolerance requires that even though people are not the same, they still deserve respect and fair treatment. This is harder. This is also a self-evident truth. Not another well-meaning lie devised for those whom we perceive as too stupid to think for themselves.

Free advice...

... does no good to its recipient, and causes loss of goodwill to the giver.

To each his own

Religious beliefs are like toothbrushes. They can be quite useful to the owner, but it is unwise to think that someone else would want to use yours.

God said...

A thought,
before it can be written
in a book of God,
must first originate
in the mind of man.

A simple way to design a secure password

Since we can access many of our belongings - from email accounts to bank accounts - online, it is important to have strong passwords.

When setting a password, two conditions should be satisfied:
1. the password for each account should be hard to guess, and
2. the password for each account should be different.

Condition 1 is obvious. A lock is useful only if it is hard to pick. A human being may try to break the password by using common personal information such as a family member's name. A computer can search through a dictionary of words and strings such as '123' that are commonly used in passwords (for example, see http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/01/26/common-internet-passwords/).

Condition 2 says that you should not use the same key for all your locks, even if the key itself is secure (i.e. the password is hard to guess). If one account is compromised, for example an email account, then your bank account with the same password also becomes vulnerable.

The challenge with setting good passwords is that most people (including me) find it hard to remember many different passwords. To get around the problem, a person can design a simple rule to set multiple passwords. In order to meet both conditions above, the password creation rule must use two elements: 1. A personal key, and 2. A key that is unique to the account name.

For example, I am Arnab and I want to set a password for my Yahoo account. I could use a password 'ArnabYahoo', except that it would be predictable. But if I used a personal key 'alaihy' (which I can remember easily because it uses the first letters of the song "As Long As I Have You"), and replaced each letter of Yahoo with the next letter to obtain 'zbipp', and created a password by alternating the letters of the two keys to obtain 'azlbaiiphpy', then the password would be hard for a stranger or a computer to guess. The password for Google would similarly be 'ahlpapihhmyf'.

The above is just an illustrative example. There can be infinite variety in the ways in which a person can choose personal and account-specific keys and combine both. Depending on your appetite for complexity and your need for security, you can design a simpler or harder rule.

The vulnerability of the above approach is that if someone knew passwords from a number of your accounts, then the person could potentially uncover the rule you are using to design passwords. But the effort required to collect multiple passwords and uncover your rule is significantly higher than guessing/discovering one simple password.

Snapshots

Sharing a collection of pictures I have taken over the years...

 The yellow flowers above are from the Anza Borrego desert state park. The flowers eclipse the sun, which given them the 'halo'.

 Gerbera daisies from my potted flower garden.

 Hydrangeas. Not from my garden :)

 Some fallen twigs with a few leaves attached.

 From a memorable trip to Mt. Olympic national park. The beach was amazing... unique in its own way. This was a Thursday afternoon with few people on the beach.

 Portland rose garden.

 Portland...

 More Portland rose...

 And more...

 You guessed it. I like flowers. Roses in particular.

A shot of Mt. Rainier from the plane. My wife worked in Redmond, WA while I completed my PhD in Houston, TX. This was a familiar sight from the window as the plane approached Seattle.

 

Big Bend National Park. The wall on the left is Mexico. The one on the right is the United States. In between flows the Rio. Amazing spot to visit. This one is stretched on my desktop as a wallpaper right now. Makes me feel like I am staring down at the reflection of the cliffs in the clear, calm water.

 A solitary tulip from Skagit Valley, WA. In spring, the tulip fields are in bloom, and the valley is bursting with color. We were there on a cold, rainy day (so characteristic of the region). And it was pretty awesome then. On a bright day, I imagine it would be heaven.

(If you use these pictures, please cite the source.)

Downfall

We live in times when most human problems are created by humans. I have found myself postulating that the sum of human miseries is constant - it is only the nature of our problems that has changed over the years.

We humans seem to suffer from two types of shortcomings that lead us to create problems for ourselves. First is the inability to understand our needs - what will hurt us - either because of a lack of intelligence or reckoning ability or because of denial. The second is more pitiful - when someone knows that doing something hurts but in incapable of changing one's ways. Ask any addict.

If you are wondering 'What brings me to these thoughts?'... I was watching a documentary on the life of Sam Clemens (better known by his psuedonym, Mark Twain), a brilliant and successful writer who in later life thought he could do business, but was otherwise a very intelligent man. As someone in the movie commented, "There is no reason for a writer to not be a successful businessman. I have just never met one."

There is another thought worrying me too. Of late, I have begun to harbor the belief that financial independence is the solution to life's problems. I have convinced myself that people work for mainly two reasons - financial needs and the gratification of being productive - and being financially independent is the key to doing productive work of one's liking and therefore being happy. The catch is that research has found that abject poverty is cause for unhappiness, but once people reach middle class wealth, additional money makes them no happier. And I have never been anything below middle class in my life. Am I lying to myself about something?

Suicide helpline autoreply

Please record your message after the beep. When you are finished recording, you may hang yourself or press star for more options.

A fable from the Panchatantra

A man once had a faithful monkey, a powerful beast aggressively protective of its master.

Then one day the man fell ill. While he slept, the monkey kept guard by his bed. A fly buzzed. It buzzed and buzzed and it flew right over the man's face. The monkey was furious. It grabbed a club and aimed it at the insect. One swing after another went in vain until the fly was finally dead.

But alas, when the mission was accomplished, there were no accolades for the well-meaning animal. Time, it seemed, had been rent in two halves by the swift strokes of the club. Before, the insect was the focus of all thoughts.

'That creature must die! Look at the man. This will happen to us all!'

Then the club fell. There was shock, there was awe, and finally there was despair.

'Whoever heard of using a club to kill a fly?'

Respect

I know a man who works really hard, but people tend not to respect him. He complains all the time. I have never once heard him say something like 'Things are under control. I am taking care of things.' Ironically, he does take care of a lot of things, things that other dislike doing, but he also complains. Just by virtue of what he does, the man ought to be of use to others. And use him, they do, and they pay him too, but they don't respect him.

Earning respect seems to have a lot of prerequisites.

People seldom respect a person who does not respect them.

Respect yourself if you wish to be respected by others. I have seen successful people brag about insincere or unethical actions. Respect vanishes right there. Success and power do not necessarily earn respect. They may fetch flattery, fear, or foolish idolization, but not respect. Of course, that is if you care about respect. There are many who enjoy flattery and being feared as much as being respected. Flattery is insincere, and comes from an expectation of receiving incentives in return. Fear comes from anticipation of penalties. Both satisfy the primal need of being bowed down to. Respect is more subtle - when someone holds you in high esteem with no expectation of incentive or penalty.

A person can react to a situation in a way that earns respect, or in a way that begs sympathy, but usually not both at the same time. This man, with whom I started my story, has spent his entire life playing the victim, begging for sympathy in his own way. It is hard to respect a man like that. Actions designed to earn respect, however, can sometimes earn both respect and sympathy, especially in cases where the outcome is tragic. The sacrifice of martyrs awakens feelings of honor and sorrow at the same time.

Mistakes

The smartest learn from the mistakes of others. Most of us prefer to learn by making our very own mistakes. And then there are those who never learn...

approximately precisely

'It is better to be approximately right than precisely wrong' - is a useful piece of advice. Of late, I have been postulating in my mind a similar-sounding approximately-precisely principle, which goes:

'It is better to know the answer to a meaningful question approximately than to know the answer to a useless question precisely.'

A memory from my last trip to India

I lay on my bed in the warm humid Kolkata weather, gazing lazily at the clock on the wall. It's an old clock, perhaps twenty years old, runs on a single AA battery. It hung on the wall in our home in Bokaro, or was it Durgapur? It brought back memories...

My father had a childlike enthusiasm about some things. When the clock was still new, he would compare the time on the clock with that on TV before the news on Doordarshan - India's primary TV channel. This was before cable. Some days the clock showed near perfect time, other days it was a little off. I remember the day my father noticed that due to the influence of gravity, the second hand progressed much faster from 0 to 15 seconds past the minute, and considerably slower from 45 to 60 seconds. The clock was not in error! It was perfect! Well... ignoring gravity anyway... There was this look of triumph in his eyes.

My brother recently sent me some old family photos. The one above is from 1990...ish. We were not rich, not poor either. We hardly had any savings but I did not know that as a child and it did not bother me. We were happy. Now, I am probably worth several times what my father was worth at the end of his life. But I miss the simple happiness. In many ways, I have less than I had then. I need to find my way back.

Charles Ponzi, Bernard Madoff and the exponential function

The Ponzi scheme is a fraudulent investment scheme named after Charles Ponzi. The idea is simple. Investors are promised fabulous returns on money. A few investors cautiously bring in small change, and the money is returned with interest as promised. Reassured, these investors bring in larger amounts. Other investors join them. People ask questions on how the money can grow so fast. Answers range from gold and diamonds mines in Africa to philanthropic donors who crave anonymity. In reality, there is no investment. Money from new investors is paid to old investors, while the organizers of the scheme help themselves to some of it. As long as the returns are coming, few questions are asked. People who ask too many questions are even censured by others who have invested money in the scheme, and are reveling in their imaginary returns.

Ponzi schemes tend to be short-lived, with a few exceptions. One important exception may be Bernard Madoff, and we will get to him. In order to thrive, a Ponzi scheme requires a growing inflow of new investment, and to get this inflow, the returns have to be be large enough to induce greed. Charles Ponzi, for example, promised to double money in 90 days. At that rate, money grows to 16 times in a year, and 4000 times in 3 years - exponential growth. To be truthful, all investment at fixed interest rate grows exponentially. Money kept in a bank at 7% interest would double in 10 years, 16 times in 40 years and 4000 times in 120 years. Exponential growth is the norm. What is not normal is the fabulous rate promised by the Ponzi scheme. I suspect that a lot of Ponzi schemers lack an appreciation of the exponential function. Anyway, if Ponzi's scheme were to go on for three years, an investor who brought in a thousand dollars on the first day would be entitled to four million in three years. So long as the investor does not demand his money, all is well. But chances are that the investor of a thousand dollars, now thinking himself a rich millionaire, would want to spend a modest few hundred thousand of his millions. At this point, paying the investor becomes a challenge because inflow of investment money can never keep up with the rapid exponential growth of accounts payable. The game winds up.

It is not hard to see that the longevity of a Ponzi scheme is inversely related to the promised rate of return, but the rate of return must noticeably exceed that obtainable through legitimate sources so as to attract new investors. In this regard, Bernard Madoff took the game to the next level. His returns were consistent, and always better than the market, but not like Charles Ponzi's. His scheme lasted over a decade in the complete absence of investments, and swallowed over 50 billion dollars. His story carries a bold warning: A smart enough Ponzi schemer may get away with a lifetime of fraud. Madoff had no investment whatsoever. A combination of a mediocre investment scheme with fraudulent accounting that shows consistent returns could last many decades. The idea is similar to what Enron and other firms charged with accounting fraud did. Somehow, productive and deceptive activities tend not to co-exist harmoniously over time, which is a great blessing for investors. Still, it pays to be cautious.

There is only one effective antidote to the Ponzi bug - transparency. Never put money into an investment that hides information, whatever the excuse may be. Madoff hid information for decades claiming that his techniques were proprietary trade secrets - sounds legitimate, but no reason is legitimate enough. Another partially effective cure is diversification. There is something pitiful about people who lament the loss of their life's savings in a Ponzi scheme. It is as if they have failed to evolve in a fundamental manner. Not only were they naive or greedy or both, they never understood the eggs and baskets principle either. The law can and should punish predators, but it is impossible to protect those who willingly set themselves up as prey.