Randy Pausch Last Lecture:Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

I spent a good part of today evening listening to Randy Pausch- Really Achieving your child hood dreams. I came across this extraordinary speech in the most unexpected of ways. I was listening to one of the recorded lectures of my MBA finance professor which has been uploaded on you tube by some junior. As the ‘you tube’ back-end logic would have it, it also showed a couple of other lectures. I was fascinated with the title – last lecture by Randy Pausch and while the long one and a half hour video look an infinite time to load because of my godforsaken internet connection, I decided to search more on Randy Pausch.

As wikipedia would carry it -

Randy Pausch(October 23, 1960 – July 25, 2008) was an American professor of computer science and human-computer interaction and design at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He learned that he had a terminal case of pancreatic cancer in September 2006. He gave an upbeat lecture entitled “The Last Lecture: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” on September 18, 2007 at Carnegie Mellon, which became a popular YouTube video and led to other media appearances. He then co-authored a book called The Last Lecture on the same theme, which became a New York Times best-seller. Pausch died of complications from pancreatic cancer on July 25, 2008.

It a memorable lecture and I strongly recommend everyone to see it. I am attaching the link for your reference.

 

 

As the lecture draws to an end, I was so much in emotion and awe for his energy, dynamism and good sense of humor. Watching the video with the knowledge that it gets delivered by a person who knows death is imminent and yet retains the passion is a lesson for all of us.

 

Prithwish

Matter of shame: Will the guilty be punished

What happened in the assembly yesterday was shameful. It raised some basic questions in my mind. How does it matter which language is used during oath-taking? Does the language matter more than the actual oath itself? Will we ever evaluate whether a MLA/MP ever delivers on his promises or will we be judge them by the language they use? Are we really a democracy or are we doing a lip service to democracy? Will the goons who cause shame to India ever be brought to book?

To read more , please visit the guest section

The Gullible Indian

One of my favourite con stories is that of Aijaz Mehboob Khan.   Mumbai mirror covered the story in August. It goes something like this –

Con man, Aijaz Mehboob Khan, convinced people that he had personal ties with Mahatma Gandhi, as well as Subhash Chandra Bose. He proved his famous affiliations with a fake Times of India cover story- a picture of him standing besides the Father of the Nation. The date of the fake times issue is July 12, 1945, while our con man himself is just 29 years old. Khan – a computer engineer and a resident of Mumbra – managed to dupe at least 10 people to the tune of Rs 50 lakh with his so called ‘freedom fighter’ connections! The people who blindly believed his claim, eventually ended up shelling out lakhs of rupees, which the con man assured them, would be invested in government contracts.

I could not stop laughing at the audacity of the con man and the gullibility of those who invested. We Indians can be a bunch of emotional fools. May be years of conditioning on superstitious beliefs and traditions have made lots of us to take things at face value. Or, may be a lack of proper education. Even the education at primary level (municipality schools) is so bereft of free and logical thinking that we end up not questioning too much in life.

Or take the case of Conman Munir Khan, who is evading arrest in several cases registered against him. Another Mumbai Mirror cover story, Munir Khan apparently developed a wonder drug called Body revival which according to his website-(http://healthreactive.com/index.asp )- is an Micro-Herbal, 100% plant based formula which dissolves the harmful deposits and flushes out the toxins (Mala) through urine and stool. It also maintains and revives the tissue cells in their state of excellent health by clearing all the channels of circulation in the body, thus, bringing the body in the state of equilibrium and forcing the disease to abandon the body in the form of various excretions (Mala)

The above instance is a clear case of imagination gone wild. As per the report people slept on the steps his clinic to be the first few people to get the medicine.

I think one of the biggest hoax was Ramar Pillai and his herbal oil (though Ganesh drinking milk was the most popular). Hailing from Tamil Nadu in India, he claimed he had an herb that can turn water into a virtually pollution-free diesel fuel or kerosene. Unruffled by allegations that Pillai’s venture is a hoax, scooter owners were queuing up in hordes to buy the cheap fuel. Pillai later confessed that he was buying hydrocarbons from the market. The most hilarious incident was someone trying to give a plausible explanation of getting Petrol from thin air- http://www.skepdic.com/herbfuel.html

If he is not using trickery, how is Pillai doing it? One theory, is that atmospheric carbon dioxide is sucked in during the reaction. The carbon dioxide combines with hydrogen liberated from water and forms the hydrocarbon fuel.

Now comes the ironical bit.There is indeed a plant which is now hailed as the future of non fossil fuel. Was Raman right ?

More of this in the next post.

Cheers

Prithwish

Monkey Business-Swinging through the wall street jungle

Monkey Business-Swinging through the wall street jungle by John Rolfe and Peter Troob

Initially I was sceptical about the book. My experience with Indian bankers turned authors has not been great and I had read enough and heard enough accounts of life in a B school and long hours in investment banking jobs to read another book on the same subject. Fresh out of Wharton and Harvard Business Schools, the authors got employed with investment bank – DLF (Donaldson, Lufkin and Jenrette). The book is their account of how the business is run and their experiences as an associate banker albeit in an extremely entertaining narrative.

“We realized that the compensation levels and the perks weren’t in place because being an associate in investment banking was a great job. They were in place because the job sucked”.

The book is a pleasant surprise. Written in an entertaining, sarcastic and brutally honest fashion it lays down in amazing detail the impersonal way in which an investment bank works. Though there are parts which are slightly exaggerated, accounts of the relentless meaningless work, boredom, sycophancy, huge ego and machismo running wild , endless meetings, bureaucracy and excess money is something which many of us in the corporate world can related to though in various degrees.

“Investment banking is a profession characterized by extremes. Whether it’s money, booze, food, sex, or work hours, the typical banker believes that more is better”.

The details are uncensored and not moderated to sugar coat it. It’s the ugly truth or the naked trust as you might call it. The narration is interesting where each author in turn writes about his experience. Through personal stories and anecdotes the authors expresses the boredom and drudgery of their daily lives—which is far from the glamour that led them to apply in the first place.

Investment Banker or not, the book is a window into the meaningless excesses, idiosyncrasies and stupid competition which marks corporate life. Its strictly recommended for those who can face these difficulties realising the irony of it all and still maintaining some sense of humour.

Prithwish

Half Truths

Book Review

THE DRUNKARD’S WALK-How Randomness Rules Our Lives-By Leonard Mlodinow

The doctor told me I had a deviated nasal septum and had to get the same operated. He asked me to get all the possible blood tests done, including tests for Hepatitis and AIDS. And though I knew my chances of both were almost zero, I could not stop worrying a couple of times before the report. What if I had tested positive? What are the chances that I will be tested positive for AIDS when I don’t have the virus (also known as False Positives)? Is there a difference between the chances that I would test positive if I was not HIV positive and the chances that I would not be HIV positive if I tested positive? What is the role of false positives in the world of medicine?

Well, it so happens that knowledge of conditional probability will tell us that the chances that someone does not have HIV Virus if he tested positive and the chances that someone tested positive even thought he did not have the virus are different. The author explains this in details in the chapter -False Positive and Positive Fallacies.

I had promised that I would shortly write a review on the book- The Drunkard’s Work.  The epilogue is so interesting that I was immediately hooked to the book. The author narrates the story of a man who won the Spanish lottery-

A few years ago a man won the Spanish national lottery with a ticket that ended in the number 48. Proud of his “accomplishment,” he revealed the theory that brought him the riches. I dreamed of the number 7 for seven straight nights, he said, “and 7 times 7 is 48.” Those of us with a better command of our multiplication tables might chuckle at the man’s error, but we all create our own view of the world and then employ it to filter and process our perceptions, extracting meaning from the ocean of data that washes over us in daily life. And we often make errors that, though less obvious, are just as significant as his.

The Drunkards book is a fascinating account of how randomness rules our lives and how often we interpret the random events erroneously. We look at the world around us, we filter a lot of data and interpret what is happening around based on our intuition and we come up with certain results. And the results are often wrong because when it comes to questions involving uncertainly and randomness we often misinprepret the world around us. We have our own directions and goals but we are also bombarded continuously with unpredictable and uncontrollable events that have a very great influence in the direction we take. For those of us who have seen a pollen grain in water moving in a zigzag fashion, there might not be an apparent direction in its movement, yet over a period of time it goes from Point A to point B. Hence while at hindsight we might think that the pollen moved from point A to point B as part of a deterministic trajectory (on purpose), it went in a totally random fashion. So even though the movement of the pollen grain looked totally random with no apparent preferential direction it did actually over longer period of tome move in a direction. Thus extrapolating it to life, even if we have no direction we will get somewhere.

The last line requires more elaboration as it an important thought which author builds on. He talks about our biases and illusions arising from randomness and the illusion of causality and the law of small numbers (there is actually a law of large number; law of small number denotes to wrong use of the law of large numbers for smaller numbers) are important ones. We often attribute more importance to success and failure than it is due. In a span of 5 years we judge a CEOs performance when mathematically speaking the probability that a CEO with a certain success rate will demonstrate that success rate in a 5 year period is only 1in 3. Also the author questions the fact that how come someone treated as a genius business manager change overnight into a dumb one.  The book is interspersed with calculations on why using small numbers for prediction may be fallacious and how certain random processes are viewed erroneously.

The author’s objective is not to declare everything as random but to tell us that the usual attributes of success and failure, of genius and mediocrity are premature and not totally a matter of effort but also have an element of random luck thrown in. Given that there is no denying the role of effort. Even JK Rowling got rejected for her novel 9 times before she became a world renowned author. The authors quotes a former IBM executive, Thomas J Watson -If you want to succeed double your failure rate.

The latter chapters of the book also look into the psychological reasons of why we make mistakes around randomness. Borrowing from some of the experiments of Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and Tversky he points out how for human beings being in control (what the author says as illusion of control) is an important need and hence we don’t like to believe that we don’t have control over life and environment.

The book is filled with interesting life accounts of mathematicians who have contributed to the development of probability (you will have to read the book to find out if all of them were mathematicians or not), interesting problems in probability (Monty Hall problem) and statistical concepts like regression towards the mean (which also has implications in Biology).

For me the book is a crash course on probability, statistics, psychology and randomness and how they affect our daily lives.

Prithwish

Pieces of the Green Puzzle

Maldives is an island country in the Indian Ocean-a perfect natural combination for the ideal tropical holiday destination. At just 4 ft 11 above sea level it is also the lowest country.

World meat production has more than quadrupled in the past half-century to some 220 million tons annually. The increase has been driven by rising incomes, population growth and urbanization particularly in the emerging meat markets of East Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. ¹

Tata Motors Ltd announced the launch in India of Jaguar and Land Rover vehicles, the marquee brands it bought from Ford Motors last year.

The truth is that falling oil prices and the deep recession are directly related. When this worldwide recession ends and economies begin to grow again, oil prices will again become a burden on the economies of all nations. Thus we are really talking about a sleeping giant that will eventually awaken and attack us again.²

For those of you who are still wondering what connects the above, you have to read on. For those of you who have already connected the dots, my objective is to open your eyes and ears to the environmental challenge.

Environmental change is in the news. It looks as if everyone’s “going green.” So what is going green all about? Is it about reducing artificial lighting at offices, making it a habit to turn off the lights when you’re leaving any room, switching off your computer when not you are not using it and wasting less paper for printing?

While going green is all of the above, it is actually much more. Have you considered for example that today, e-waste is the fastest growing component of waste. That’s because people now upgrade mobile phones, computers and televisions more frequently than before. I am not being judgemental about how to lead one’s life. But being open to multiple points of view is an important criteria for an evolved society.

Environment today is still a back seat for most policy decisions in developing countries. One might say that developed countries have had their share of growth and now they can’t bully the developing counties into accepting strict environment norms. Developing countries, including China and India, believe it is the responsibility of wealthy industrialised nations such as the UK and US to set a clear example on cutting carbon emissions. For example, the rapidly growing Chinese economy has recently overtaken America as the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide. Yet America has historically emitted far more emissions than China, and on a per capita basis Chinese emissions are around a quarter of those of the US.³The Chinese government argues that it has a moral right to develop and grow its economy — carbon emissions will inevitably grow with it. Another interesting point is that most of the emission related activities are outsourced to developing countries.

But who is suffering?

Maldives, a small Asian country, is just 4 ft 11 in above sea level-the lowest country on the plane. If global warming proceeds apace, sea levels around the Maldives will rise 60 cm in the next 50 years, swallowing large tracts of the country.

Maldives president Mohamed Nasheed correctly points out –

We need shared responsibility. You can’t ask countries like India to stop consumption. We might be the victims but there are millions and billions of others. I shouldn’t be so selfish to push for that. Countries like India should invest heavily in renewable energy and maintain lower emission levels and higher energy consumption. I think the winners of the 21st century will be those who are bold enough to venture into new technology. We are on the verge of a technological breakthrough, a revolution again that would have more impact than the industrial revolution perhaps.

He is very correct to point out that people are still not that concerned about environment. Countries still don’t have climate change as a major election issue. Until it becomes an election issue, politicians aren’t going to take notice. But it will become one in the next five years.

Let’s look at another point largely ignored -meat consumption. Meat demand rises strongly as countries grow wealthier and urbanize. What if the key actors in climate change are…cows, pigs, and chickens? argue Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang , in World watch Magazine.

They point out that whenever the causes of climate change are discussed, fossil fuels top the list. The life cycle and supply chain of domesticated animals raised for food have been vastly underestimated as a source of Green House Gas (GHG-carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide) and in fact account for at least half of all human-caused GHGs. They estimate that livestock and their by-products actually account for at least 32,564million tons of CO2e per year, or 51 percent of annual worldwide GHG emissions .If this argument is right, it implies that replacing livestock products with better alternatives (Soya Milk??) would be the best strategy for reversing climate change.

We will be forced to research and develop alternative energy sources. Our current rate of fossil fuel usage will lead to an energy crisis this century. Take automobiles for example. American obsession for oil and it being one of the cheapest liquid available in the US led to the development of oil guzzlers like Hummer. A normal Hummer gives around 500 meters to a litre of diesel. But the next generation of cars will be Hybrid cars- a vehicle which combines an internal combustion engine and one or more electric motors. The company which comes out with an economically viable car in the alternate fuel segment will emerge a winner. So where does Tata, one of India’s largest manufactures of cars comes into the picture. Swami Ankleshwar Aiyar in his article Swaminomics makes a very good observation-

“I cheered when Tata Motors acquired Jaguar and Land Rover (JLR), two global luxury brands. But that acquisition has poisoned your balance sheet, and threatens your whole future……

JLR dragged Tata Motors into a net loss of Rs 329 crore in the April-June quarter, following a whopping Rs 2,505 crore loss the previous quarter. You hope JLR will turn the corner in 2010-11. But this assumes a return to business as usual, and that may not happen. The luxury car market may have changed forever – in the direction of electric vehicles. You ignore that change only at your peril.

Six years ago, the world auto industry talked of hydrogen-powered cars, using fuel cells, as vehicles of the future. That turned out to be a passing fad. Actual market fashion moved in a different direction – toward huge sports utility vehicles (SUVs). The biggest of these was the Hummer of General Motors. Every big auto manufacturer shifted to SUVs.

However, the market was transformed when oil crossed $100/barrel in 2007 and touched $147/barrel in 2008. Simultaneously, the Great Recession arrived. Demand for SUVs crashed as buyers switched to more energy-efficient vehicles, and the switch drove General Motors and Chrysler into bankruptcy…….The era of cheap oil is over…..

So, Mr Tata, let’s hope we hear soon from you about JLR going into hybrids and electric plug-ins. The aim is not to save the planet, just to save JLR – and maybe even Tata Motors – from extinction”

Any discussion on environment cannot end with 1000 words article. I will conclude with our obsession with Oil and how it affects our political, social and cultural lives. And though the dwindling oil supply may not be as ecologically catastrophic as global warming, it is likely to start having an almost immediate impact on every aspect of our daily lives and the luxuries we have come to take for granted. Charles Dickens begins his novel, the Tale of two cities, with the most memorable lines- it’s the best of times, It’s the worst if times. May be while we are enjoying the fruits of human advancement, technology, limitless supply of energy, it’s time to stop and ponder if all this is going to last forever or are we living with borrowed resources from the next generation ?

Prithwish

References

1. http://atlas.aaas.org/index.php?part=2&sec=natres&sub=meatfish
2. http://www.centerforajustsociety.org/press/forum.asp?cjsForumID=1168
3. http://www.abdn.ac.uk/~src167/Copenhagen.htm
4. Documentary- A crude Awakening, the Oil Crisis

Umbrella Morals

I was in a training programme and one of the topics for discussion was our internal value system- those ideals and beliefs which are important for us and which we hold as special and non negotiable. It is good to have a strong value system. I mean for me fairness is a very important personal value. However the important questions here is -how good are we at deciding what is right and what is wrong? I mean do we have an internal value meter which tells us what is wrong ( in absolute terms ) or do we have some sort of convenient value meter which is more of a relative adjustment-my action compared to something which is more seriously wrong or grave in nature. And is it not true that sometimes we let ourselves off the hook for those small transgressions. Is there something called the absolute value system or do we get our judgement into deciding our right and wrong deeds? Let me explain.