RESOLUTIONS...

Okay there was the New Year last year, and there were these people near London Eye kissing each other the moment clock ticked 12. The firework display, which was ravishing and had cost the already GDP-draught economy enough to feed Isabelle Caro, went unnoticed by the visitors because most of them were just too busy kissing and the ones who weren't kissing were busy watching the ones kissing. Pity that Isabelle Caro died, one of the many sad things that happened last year, although it wasn't much shocking to most people like me. And here we go, it is the New Year again. The time people to party, get drunk, take drugs, smoke the hell out, involve in illegal shagging the last night of December and take resolutions the next day not to do these things ever again in their life.

Speaking of resolutions, I did take a few last year.

Resolution no 1: I will quit drinking Carlsberg.

I thought of taking the resolution 'I will quit smoking' like everyone else just because it sounds cool but too bad for me that I don't smoke. I wonder if the dude who narrated why Lucy Strike was good to smoke ever did take one such resolution but it just doesn't matter any more because he would be dead by now even if he didn't smoke. Anyway, since it is Carlsberg and I couldn't resist, I took a less arrogant one the next day - 'I will only drink Carlsberg that I did not pay for'. Lamentably, it was so much easier in the UK to steal them at an 'off-license' shop especially when the pretty girl behind the counter was busy (i) casting her vote for a reality show in BBC or (ii) dreaming of kissing the next boyfriend at the next New Year near London Eye, leading the million dollar firework display into vain again by belonging to the group who kiss each other and being the reason for the ones who doesn't kiss to miss the show too. Either of these kept happening every time I kept walking in and out of the store.

After a few months I started drinking Carlsberg more than the previous year because I was too busy trying to quit stealing!

Resolution no 2: I will stop using gallows humour.

Gallows humour are really funny. Some say even dogs laugh at them, the some belonging to the community who 'love' animals but just do not hesitate to kill, mince and eat them when it comes to satisfying their hunger. For gallows humour to work, the timing has to be correct. At one funeral with cloud of sorrowfulness I gave a toast to the father, of a lovely ten year old son Jake, who bereaved the death of his mother. High five for those who found the last sentence to be some family tree question from a mind chopping aptitude exam which we could never solve. Back to the point, just to lighten up the mood, I thought of opening my toast with a joke.

'You know, my mom thought LOL meant lots of love and thats when she texted me your grandmother just died. LOL.''

This time the timing was some light years away. Jake giggled, the rest frowned and the joke went into Jake's Facebook status soon. Okay people, if kids love it why should I stop doing it?

Resolution no 3: I will be nicer to dumb people.

I'm definitely not Mr. Popular in College but thankfully I'm not Mr. Unpopular either. That would be stupid Raj especially since I told every one that he, and not I, was the one stealing keyboards from the library computers. Poor Raj was denied access to library any more but I still tried to be nicer to the other idiots around. Unfortunately enough I soon came to know Aristotle once said that it is only by holding up idiocy to ridicule might we reduce it. Dejected that my resolution was so anti-Aristotle, I boarded the plane to London and heard the blonde scream 'Earthquake Earthquake!!' when the flight shook hard due to passing through turbulence.

Thats it, if being nicer means sucking up to people like this, I'd rather ditch this dopey resolution altogether.

Having nothing worked, I have decided not to take resolutions any more in life. Perhaps, that is my resolution for this year.

Cheers,
G'tam.

G.I. vs JOE.

Imagine it is an exciting day at the fat stock and poultry exhibition, somewhere in India, and you wrangle with your mind to estimate the weight of a healthy ox you would like to buy. After some minutes of guessing you finally give up and decide to ask someone. You have two choices – one is to ask a trader who has years of expertise and pick his number. And the other, is a group, say of size 30, of amateur traders, visitors and the experienced and highly skilled trader himself, where you are just going to average their answers. Which one would you choose?

Probably a lousy question to ask someone, as you may think. When I was asked the same thing, I opted for the experienced trader with a ‘duh’ look on my face like most of you since a skilled trader could definitely predict better than a bunch of amateurs. But James Suroweicki’s research says otherwise. Group intelligence work in an amazing manner with its distinctive feature being it is easy to miss and when you catch it, it is difficult to accept.

Let us get out of the boring research hypothesis or findings or whatever they call it for a while and look at something ‘interesting’. You see, research itself suggests that giving expectations to the readers in the beginning would encourage them to go ahead. The risk is the work being declared dull, though pretty interesting it may be, since the expectations given in the beginning would lead to a flawed decision making, according to theories from humanistic evolutionary psychology. Okay no research talk, seriously.

I was on cloud nine when I heard Roger Waters is planning a world tour and hence tried to browse for tickets, in case if they are visiting the city I live in. I have always loved Pink Floyd and ‘We don’t need no Education’ was my daily prayer when I was at school. It is ironic I am pursuing Masters Degree; giving away I can be a hypocrite too. To confirm the news, I typed the keywords ‘Roger Waters’s world tour’ in Google which took a fraction of seconds (with the connection which I had in India three years back, it would have taken five minutes though) publish its results. The first page had ten results, our of 328,000, which were closely related to the Roger Water’s tour- The Wall, 2011-2012. If you are a regular search engine user, these things wouldn’t surprise you. I was, but for a different reason. Suppressing the bliss coming out seeing that they are scheduled to play at the arena nearby and taking away my friends’ fun of witnessing my girly ‘yahooooo’ expression, I made a futile attempt to figure out how a search engine could pick the best choices among the billion web pages entangled in the global network. Sure enough I have heard of the famous ‘Page Rank’ algorithm first designed by Larry Page. He is lucky in a way that naming the algorithm after his made sense, though it is convincing this wasn’t the reason the name came up. Imagine Livermore physicist Dick Post inventing a new ‘ball bearing’ machine and naming it after him. Physics can become interesting sometimes.

Pardon me. Back to the point- The success of the page rank algorithm largely relates to the concept of Group Intelligence (Hence the title G.I. vs Joe, the average Joe. Please ignore if you are bright minded and had already gotten it). The logic behind which the algorithm was designed did not make sense when I was studying computers or perhaps nothing made sense what I studied about computers. Here’s what Google says-

''PageRank capitalized on the uniquely democratic characteristic of the web by using its vast link structure as an organisational tool. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. Google assesses the page importance by the votes it receives. But Google looks at more than sheer volume of votes, or links; it also analyses the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves ‘important’ weigh more heavily and help to make other pages ‘important’''.

If it makes sense, then good luck having a future as a computer engineer. Look at Surowiecki’s explanation now. In a fraction of second, what Google does is to ask the entire Web to decide which page contains the most useful information, and the page that gets the most votes goes first on the list. And that page, or the one immediately beneath it, more often than not is in fact the one with the most useful information. To put it in political terms, Google is republic and not a perfect democracy. This is because the final vote is the ‘weighted average’ rather than the simple average like the ox-weighter’s estimate. Nonetheless, the big sites that have more influence over the crowd’s final verdict have that influence only because of all the votes that smaller sites have given them. If the smaller sites were giving the wrong sites too much influence, Google’s search results would not be accurate. In the end, the crowd still rules. To smart at the top, the system has to be smart all the way through.

'Crowd performs better' does not mean if you allow a group of amateurs to run and take their average timing, this will be better than Usain Bolt’s, who wants to play for Manchester United. (I know who he wants to play for is entirely irrelevant, but since it is ManUnited I thought I should write it! It would be pointless though, since he would every time run faster than the ball would travel often missing out).The group intelligence would work only when it comes to decision making provided the group contains at least 30 members satisfying the following conditions- diversity, independence and decentralisation.

Cognitive diversity (and not the cultural diversity) is important in this context. The more diverse people’s thoughts are, the more flexible they could think leading to extreme inputs from them, both positive and negative. When put together through statistical measures, be it simple mean or the weighted average mean, these positive and negative inputs would cancel out by themselves and give us the most appropriate result that we could possibly get. This magic would work only if the individuals are given freedom to think and express which the independence factor is, precisely. And the last thing is- this would best work if they work in a decentralized manner rather than being subjected to a top down decision making process, the very factor that gave the Linux operating system a huge success. Linux is owned by no one and there are no bosses running around instructing people what to do. When a problem arises with the way Linux works, it is solved by its users, who offer solutions. Amazingly this decentralization provides both diversity and independence, making it the most important factor.

With all these said and done, this pretty much sums up why ‘the many’ are smarter than ‘the few’. The impact of this is all around us, though we seem to ignore it, from small things that make up our day to day life to large corporations which create wonders. Taking it would perhaps not make us genius over-night like Page but would certainly enhance our decision making processes and with that being understood, let us be careful in naming our inventions after our's just in case if we did invent one.

Cheers,
G'tam.

Typical Americans.

It is both difficult and easy to define typical Americans. Probably, a classic way to start this blog since most of my friends know I admire certain things that the Americans do and equally get disgusted by some. 'Wall Street' and 'Hollywood', of course, are a couple of things which amazes me, while I silently ponder does it reflect good on me to be in awe for the likes of Warren Buffet and other 'gamblers' like Dick Fuld considering the increasing scandals out there. On the other hand, their view about football, among many others, makes me wonder how they built Wall Street in the first place. This might seem a little exaggeration but please have a look at The New Yorker article about the 'real' football:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/cartoonists/2010/07/soccer-tips.html#entry-more. Funny, yes definitely, but allowing a slice of rational thinking would make you realize you are actually laughing at the fact that their view about what the rest of the world views normal is different and unconventional.

To begin with, it is good Mankoff starts it off quoting ''world's most popular sport'' but please do not underestimate Americans. When they put things within double quotes, it either means it is important and deserve attention or that they are being sarcastic. Most of the times, the latter is true.

Buying a vuvuzela made him less popular among his neighbours. It was a nice touch (the American way to say it was clever. We can't get rid of them, can we?) using semi-syllogistic approach towards liking football and it is self explanatory why he did not feel American buying a vuvuzela. Perhaps he would have felt American if he had bought a computer with a catalogue with customer service number printed in bold, which when called usually finds a yawning, bored and intelligent engineering graduate in India picking up the call and faking American accent. Yes it is frustrating when a match ends with a goalless draw and it was even more frustrating when it was about to happen in the world cup finals, thanks to Iniesta for saving the awkward scenario leading to another such serious but lousy effort by an American at mocking the game. Mocking is good but mocking football because it has its players using foot and not hands is lousiest at its best. It is 'FOOT'ball for God's sake!

I like American Humour and the way it differs from the rest of the world's. Friends, for instance, was the funniest sitcom I have seen, which I openly admit ignoring people who call me a loser when I say that, and Chandler and Charlie Brown were once my heroes. I also like the way they say 'just kidding' after every joke though when the statement is outrageously and plainly ironic. Ending with 'just kidding' in America makes sense assuming they all own guns and use them on a regular basis (just kidding). What I do not like, perhaps, is my tendency to often slip into irrelevance. Anyway let us get back to business.

Mandoff's chauvinistic, jingoistic, Americanistic, obnoxistic suggestion of removing the goalie would have been funny to Americans and even to British but wasn't to me. Growing up in India where sport equals time-waste, I often was a part of a bunch of losers at primary school who did not know what football is and played with fifteen boys in a team, each using every body part possible to gain a competitive advantage devoid of restrictions, without a goal-keeper at either end! The suggestion made me relive those moments and it gave me smile rather than a chance to laugh my ass out.

Point of this post?
Well, as usual there is no point! I just wonder how things including emotions are handled in a different way at different places and the way people from one part of world perceive things differ from the other. That is what makes mother Earth special and human beings the most interesting of all species ever evolved/intelligently designed by The Creator (you see, I am unbiased towards the never ending debatable-theories of evolution and creationism. May be you would now call me a typical Indian!). While all other things differ, one opinion/fact (I am leaving it to the language freaks who manage to find slightest variations of meaning in words in certain contexts to pick one) remains common through out: ''THE GREATEST SPORT ON EARTH''. By far there has not been another one to oppose this opinion/fact, leaving the statement valid to perpetuity!

Cheers,
Gautam.