missing-links dept.
The post-Mumbai popular outburst has provided an interesting insight to me. For too long, the actors (stateful, not stateless ;-)) in Indian democracy have been completely unaccountable pretty much for five years of their elected terms. This has rendered a good state in theory, practically dysfunctional. For any truly functional democracy there has to be a closed loop where the common man gets to hold everyone in power accountable.
There were two crucial elements missing in Indian democracy to close the loop, and now I see those two elements gradually taking their rightful place, and plugging this gap.
The first, with the electronic media, has happened over the last decade, and continues to go from strength to strength. However, someone needs to keep a check on the media too.
The next, with social networks and cellphones, is giving unprecedented community mobilization and expressive power to common people. The next decade belongs to the emergence of this particular piece of the puzzle. For it keeps all of the other pieces in check, and is more or less self-regulated. You can see it throw up temporary structures as responses to particular situations, even though for the most part, it is structure-less. Politicians the world over, with the singular exception of a certain compulsive-Blackberry-using President-elect, are really clueless about this phenomenon.
The result is this amazingly organic system that's really self-evolving, and is mutually accountable. Its not mandated by the Indian constitution, no one set out to create it -- it has just appeared out of thin air. A politician who can keep this formless beast happy can go a long way in life :-).
Perhaps a few years from now, when enough has been written about this phenomenon, the technology has matured and become truly ubiquitous, and the politicians begin to grok it, the 'last piece of the puzzle' will finally get its due, and some official constitutional recognition.
Showing posts with label hazardous guesses. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hazardous guesses. Show all posts
Friday, December 05, 2008
Sunday, November 30, 2008
its-the-end-of-the-world dept.
On September 11, 2001, I was on a flight to San Francisco, sleeping soundly somewhere over the Pacific when the twin towers were attacked. I was originally scheduled to fly on the 9th, but I was down with the flu, and my departure was delayed by a couple of days. Three-fourths of the way from Singapore, the flight was redirected to Vancouver. After landing, the plane sat on the tarmac for five hours before being carefully unloaded. (We were given no information about what had happened until about two hours after we had landed). I then spent two days in Canada, glued to my television set at the Hyatt Regency, where Singapore Airlines so graciously put us up -- a displaced, disjointed lot.
The world changed then, and the world is about to change again. The attacks on Mumbai, in that sense, are exactly the same and seek to send the same message to the world. It would be a mistake to think this is an attack on India. I wouldn't relegate it to such a narrow context. Fundamentally this is an attack by a closed, nihilistic society on an open and progressive one. Ostensibly, the message being sent is, "No matter how superior you think you are, we can bring you to your knees."
Any old-world ideology can be twisted into this template, and made to work in this way. In this case, and this time in the world, Islam is being used in this way. The mental trick being used here is to really zero in on the most intolerant parts of scripture, and use that as an intellectual override for irrational acts. Every old-world religion has enough material in its body of scripture to be vulnerable to this kind of manipulation. After all, they were only created by human beings.
The desired effect of the attack is more subtle, it really seeks to transform the victim (a vibrant, open society) into a mirror of the perpetrator (a prejudiced, closed one).
So when we put it in that context, this is really a sequel to 9-11, and the London Underground bombings and needs to be put in proper perspective.
The scale in terms of physical impact may not be as extensive as 9-11, but its equally powerful in terms of its media impact, and hold on the popular imagination. Also, India has been attacked only because it is the most accessible open society that can be subject to such an attack. New York and London have significantly raised the bar for any attack of this kind, and so Mumbai was the best soft target.
The challenge here is to preserve openness and freedom, without becoming an image of the attacker. The more we seek to defend ourselves, the more closeted we become as a society. So, IMHO, offence seems to be the best form of defence in this case. The hardest part is finding what form the offensive strategy should take, without causing the world to come to an end :-). This last bit because the target of the offensive strategy is a failed state with nuclear weapons. Who really runs this state? Who would be the target of retaliation?
I do hope such an offensive strategy exists, and is found in time by those whose job it is to think more deeply about such things.
On September 11, 2001, I was on a flight to San Francisco, sleeping soundly somewhere over the Pacific when the twin towers were attacked. I was originally scheduled to fly on the 9th, but I was down with the flu, and my departure was delayed by a couple of days. Three-fourths of the way from Singapore, the flight was redirected to Vancouver. After landing, the plane sat on the tarmac for five hours before being carefully unloaded. (We were given no information about what had happened until about two hours after we had landed). I then spent two days in Canada, glued to my television set at the Hyatt Regency, where Singapore Airlines so graciously put us up -- a displaced, disjointed lot.
The world changed then, and the world is about to change again. The attacks on Mumbai, in that sense, are exactly the same and seek to send the same message to the world. It would be a mistake to think this is an attack on India. I wouldn't relegate it to such a narrow context. Fundamentally this is an attack by a closed, nihilistic society on an open and progressive one. Ostensibly, the message being sent is, "No matter how superior you think you are, we can bring you to your knees."
Any old-world ideology can be twisted into this template, and made to work in this way. In this case, and this time in the world, Islam is being used in this way. The mental trick being used here is to really zero in on the most intolerant parts of scripture, and use that as an intellectual override for irrational acts. Every old-world religion has enough material in its body of scripture to be vulnerable to this kind of manipulation. After all, they were only created by human beings.
The desired effect of the attack is more subtle, it really seeks to transform the victim (a vibrant, open society) into a mirror of the perpetrator (a prejudiced, closed one).
So when we put it in that context, this is really a sequel to 9-11, and the London Underground bombings and needs to be put in proper perspective.
The scale in terms of physical impact may not be as extensive as 9-11, but its equally powerful in terms of its media impact, and hold on the popular imagination. Also, India has been attacked only because it is the most accessible open society that can be subject to such an attack. New York and London have significantly raised the bar for any attack of this kind, and so Mumbai was the best soft target.
The challenge here is to preserve openness and freedom, without becoming an image of the attacker. The more we seek to defend ourselves, the more closeted we become as a society. So, IMHO, offence seems to be the best form of defence in this case. The hardest part is finding what form the offensive strategy should take, without causing the world to come to an end :-). This last bit because the target of the offensive strategy is a failed state with nuclear weapons. Who really runs this state? Who would be the target of retaliation?
I do hope such an offensive strategy exists, and is found in time by those whose job it is to think more deeply about such things.
Thursday, September 27, 2007
rupee-shining dept.
The Indian rupee has quietly made its way into the 39s against the Dollar. I anticipated at the beginning of the year that it would get into and perhaps cross the 38s. That still remains to be seen. The rise of the Indian economy and the massive inflows of foreign investment into India make this inevitable. The implications for the software industry in India are interesting.
Cheap Labor?
Right now most of the industry located back home is based entirely on the labor cost differential and the Rupee-Dollar ratio. Indian programmers and software technologists are paid much, much less than their American counterparts *and* Indian software company executives :-) even accounting for purchasing power parity. Both these differentials were so high until recently (as recently as 2 years ago, the Rupee was still orbiting in the 47+ per dollar range), that companies had no motivation to change their business model, which was essentially a form of labor arbitrage. Companies made money in one of two ways:
1.) Hiring programmers in India and paying them a low salary, and earning more dollars per hour on their behalf from their customers.
2.) Hiring programmers, getting them H1Bs, and paying them a low salary in the US :-), and etc., etc., etc.
Cheap is not Cheap Anymore
However, two things are rapidly changing this scenario and threaten to change the industry as we know it. The first one is of course, the rise of the rupee. The second is the gradual entry of software multinationals into India. This is putting pressure on salary packages and increasing the attrition rate in Indian companies. There have always been engineers who looked down upon the 'Labor Arbitrage' way of doing business. The difference now is, these people don't have to work for these companies in India if they have the right skills. There are just too many better choices. Maybe these choices are available only to the top 5-10% of engineers right now, but over time, I can see it lead to a cascading series of attrition.
Its getting easier and easier for multi-national companies to set up base in India, and most are doing so. They are gradually cutting out the middle men and managing their own set ups, leveraging their existing Indian employees to manage their India operations. The days of the "Offshore Development Center" managed by an outsourcing company are definitely numbered.
This does not bode well for indigenous companies. They will now have to look at product development as a *real* and focussed business model. In most companies today, there is usually some "in-house product development", which is a euphemism for keeping people busy during lean times, and for maintaining some staff redundancy. The up-side is that the growth of the Indian economy means that soon, India in itself will be an attractive software market, and the companies that have products targeted for this market will reap rich dividends.
Some Crystal-Ball Gazing
The worst case scenario would be this nascent market for software products and services being gobbled up whole by muti-national software companies, who have the financial muscle to overwhelm Indian companies. This is a pie that Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and SAP could neatly divide among themselves.
We could draw a parallel to what happened to the Indian car industry after liberalization. The biggest names -- Hindustan Motors and Premier Automobiles -- all but disappeared. Some plucky companies that innovated and adapted to new market conditions (Tata, Bajaj, M&M) survived and even thrived in the era of globalization.
Its all going to be interesting to watch. Just make sure *you* aren't working for a 'Premier Automobiles' of the software industry, when the time comes :-).
The Indian rupee has quietly made its way into the 39s against the Dollar. I anticipated at the beginning of the year that it would get into and perhaps cross the 38s. That still remains to be seen. The rise of the Indian economy and the massive inflows of foreign investment into India make this inevitable. The implications for the software industry in India are interesting.
Cheap Labor?
Right now most of the industry located back home is based entirely on the labor cost differential and the Rupee-Dollar ratio. Indian programmers and software technologists are paid much, much less than their American counterparts *and* Indian software company executives :-) even accounting for purchasing power parity. Both these differentials were so high until recently (as recently as 2 years ago, the Rupee was still orbiting in the 47+ per dollar range), that companies had no motivation to change their business model, which was essentially a form of labor arbitrage. Companies made money in one of two ways:
1.) Hiring programmers in India and paying them a low salary, and earning more dollars per hour on their behalf from their customers.
2.) Hiring programmers, getting them H1Bs, and paying them a low salary in the US :-), and etc., etc., etc.
Cheap is not Cheap Anymore
However, two things are rapidly changing this scenario and threaten to change the industry as we know it. The first one is of course, the rise of the rupee. The second is the gradual entry of software multinationals into India. This is putting pressure on salary packages and increasing the attrition rate in Indian companies. There have always been engineers who looked down upon the 'Labor Arbitrage' way of doing business. The difference now is, these people don't have to work for these companies in India if they have the right skills. There are just too many better choices. Maybe these choices are available only to the top 5-10% of engineers right now, but over time, I can see it lead to a cascading series of attrition.
Its getting easier and easier for multi-national companies to set up base in India, and most are doing so. They are gradually cutting out the middle men and managing their own set ups, leveraging their existing Indian employees to manage their India operations. The days of the "Offshore Development Center" managed by an outsourcing company are definitely numbered.
This does not bode well for indigenous companies. They will now have to look at product development as a *real* and focussed business model. In most companies today, there is usually some "in-house product development", which is a euphemism for keeping people busy during lean times, and for maintaining some staff redundancy. The up-side is that the growth of the Indian economy means that soon, India in itself will be an attractive software market, and the companies that have products targeted for this market will reap rich dividends.
Some Crystal-Ball Gazing
The worst case scenario would be this nascent market for software products and services being gobbled up whole by muti-national software companies, who have the financial muscle to overwhelm Indian companies. This is a pie that Microsoft, Oracle, IBM and SAP could neatly divide among themselves.
We could draw a parallel to what happened to the Indian car industry after liberalization. The biggest names -- Hindustan Motors and Premier Automobiles -- all but disappeared. Some plucky companies that innovated and adapted to new market conditions (Tata, Bajaj, M&M) survived and even thrived in the era of globalization.
Its all going to be interesting to watch. Just make sure *you* aren't working for a 'Premier Automobiles' of the software industry, when the time comes :-).
Monday, February 13, 2006
you've-got-mail dept.
What a lame title, but anyway, here goes...
Email clients are hitting their limits of scalability.
Now, I get almost a couple hundred small emails everyday, and keeping track of them is a nightmare.
Email traffic characteristics have fundamentally changed since I started working. Now they are almost instant messages, in form, mode of address, size and content. Most people seem to treat them as instant messages with more metadata tags and end-to-end archival built into the fabric.
I recently listened to the CEO of the company I work for mentioning that e-mail is a store and forward protocol, like physical mail, and that is the way he handles his email : read it once in the morning, once at lunch, and once in the evening, and don't look at it in between.
However, with disk, memory, processor and network bandwidth being what they are today, email is more like an instantaneous delivery system. And senders invariably expect recipients to respond instantaneously with at least an acknowledgement.
All of which basically makes my poor email client unable to cope. Now I have MacOS Tiger, so with Spotlight, my life is that much easier, but it only highlights how critical Desktop Search will be as an application in the next few years.
The trouble with mail clients is that they are still stuck in the 2-d, tabular, database world, when they really need to be data mining applications. Filters and Saved Searches are just stored procedures, in the end, and a highly watered down from at that. What I really need is a multi-dimensional, heuristic tool for analysing my mail, and presenting it to me so that I don't miss anything critical.
I don't actually mind seeing a bit of spam here and there, as long as I don't drop critical emails.
I think it would be a great idea to build a next generation communication tool that does this, combining e-mail, instant messaging and voice. Gmail is ofcourse, the best bet, and Google is surely on the right track by integrating Gtalk with it, but I have privacy concerns with Gmail.
Actually, frankly, Google is beginning to scare me. It is beginning to resemble too closely, the funny little guy you introduce to your friends, who quickly usurps centrestage, and makes your world suddenly unpredictable, and somewhat dependent on his whim. You wonder, "Have I created a saint or a sociopath?".
Hmmm...
What a lame title, but anyway, here goes...
Email clients are hitting their limits of scalability.
Now, I get almost a couple hundred small emails everyday, and keeping track of them is a nightmare.
Email traffic characteristics have fundamentally changed since I started working. Now they are almost instant messages, in form, mode of address, size and content. Most people seem to treat them as instant messages with more metadata tags and end-to-end archival built into the fabric.
I recently listened to the CEO of the company I work for mentioning that e-mail is a store and forward protocol, like physical mail, and that is the way he handles his email : read it once in the morning, once at lunch, and once in the evening, and don't look at it in between.
However, with disk, memory, processor and network bandwidth being what they are today, email is more like an instantaneous delivery system. And senders invariably expect recipients to respond instantaneously with at least an acknowledgement.
All of which basically makes my poor email client unable to cope. Now I have MacOS Tiger, so with Spotlight, my life is that much easier, but it only highlights how critical Desktop Search will be as an application in the next few years.
The trouble with mail clients is that they are still stuck in the 2-d, tabular, database world, when they really need to be data mining applications. Filters and Saved Searches are just stored procedures, in the end, and a highly watered down from at that. What I really need is a multi-dimensional, heuristic tool for analysing my mail, and presenting it to me so that I don't miss anything critical.
I don't actually mind seeing a bit of spam here and there, as long as I don't drop critical emails.
I think it would be a great idea to build a next generation communication tool that does this, combining e-mail, instant messaging and voice. Gmail is ofcourse, the best bet, and Google is surely on the right track by integrating Gtalk with it, but I have privacy concerns with Gmail.
Actually, frankly, Google is beginning to scare me. It is beginning to resemble too closely, the funny little guy you introduce to your friends, who quickly usurps centrestage, and makes your world suddenly unpredictable, and somewhat dependent on his whim. You wonder, "Have I created a saint or a sociopath?".
Hmmm...
Thursday, February 02, 2006
nein-nein-nein dept.
I have observed that the best employees, i.e. individual contributors, are those who always say "No.". By always negating everything, they put the onus on their managers to come up with irrefutable logic and nail down the specifications for tasks, so that they would not get no for an answer.
Unfortunately, such people are also not the best people to get along with.
However if you're looking to start a product company, hire only these naysayers as programmers. Optimisitc kids with stars in their eyes will overcommit themselves and be the bane of your scheduling endeavors.
I have observed that the best employees, i.e. individual contributors, are those who always say "No.". By always negating everything, they put the onus on their managers to come up with irrefutable logic and nail down the specifications for tasks, so that they would not get no for an answer.
Unfortunately, such people are also not the best people to get along with.
However if you're looking to start a product company, hire only these naysayers as programmers. Optimisitc kids with stars in their eyes will overcommit themselves and be the bane of your scheduling endeavors.
Friday, October 28, 2005
get-me-to-the-church-on-time dept.
I saw an interesting discussion on live-in relationships on ETV Marathi a couple of days ago. The dicussion was hosted by journalist Nikhil Wagle, and the panel included three very eloquent women whose names, I'm afraid, I do not know/remember.
Since I'm essentially an armchair-anarchist, I pretty much don't care about these stupid issues, unless they affect me in some way.
However, since I'm getting married soon, the question that really interested me was this : What is the marriage process exactly? I mean how would you define a 'marriage'? For that matter, how would you exactly define a 'live-in relationship'? Where does a relationship stop being a marriage and become a live-in relationship?
OK, the traditionalists in the audience must be puzzled. How are live-in relationships the same thing as marriage? And so must the modernists, who want to throw the whole "vivaha-sanstha" out the window.
To me, the difference is a little fuzzy between the two. Why?
I ran a mental checklist of the characteristics of the two, and it all distilled down to this, if we abstract out the details of ritual, cast creed, religion, location, age and other unimportant things (such as sex and feelings ;-)).
Marriage is essentially a three-way contract. Two parties -- the bride and groom, enter into the contract, with a third party as witness, arbiter, judge and sentencer in case of contractual violations (most often, in India, the thord party is most likely to also be the mastermind behind the whole deal in the first place).
With live-in relationships. the first two parties dispense with the third party -- the enforcing authority. So its purely a two-way contract between man and woman.
With this bare-bones definition, the pros and cons of each are easily open to analysis.
In the case of marriage, if the third party enforcer is too strong, bad marriages can stifle the partners. For live-in relationships, since both partners forfeit the protection offered by society/law, the weaker of the two partners is vulnerable to being exploited by the stronger.
But I suspect that most of these people who appear on talk shows and defend or advocate live-in relationships are actually living in a marriage, although they don't know it :-). In their case, social approval is often tacit, and their peer community (people they hung out with in college, their school friends, family) will take on the 'enforcer' role without anybody being the wiser :-).
This gives rise to Anshuman's law of procedural equivalence :-). In short, this law states that all things being equal, a relationship shall be deemed as a wedding as long as it can be proven that a three-way contract exists and is subscribed to by the concerned parties, either explicitly, or tacitly.
I saw an interesting discussion on live-in relationships on ETV Marathi a couple of days ago. The dicussion was hosted by journalist Nikhil Wagle, and the panel included three very eloquent women whose names, I'm afraid, I do not know/remember.
Since I'm essentially an armchair-anarchist, I pretty much don't care about these stupid issues, unless they affect me in some way.
However, since I'm getting married soon, the question that really interested me was this : What is the marriage process exactly? I mean how would you define a 'marriage'? For that matter, how would you exactly define a 'live-in relationship'? Where does a relationship stop being a marriage and become a live-in relationship?
OK, the traditionalists in the audience must be puzzled. How are live-in relationships the same thing as marriage? And so must the modernists, who want to throw the whole "vivaha-sanstha" out the window.
To me, the difference is a little fuzzy between the two. Why?
I ran a mental checklist of the characteristics of the two, and it all distilled down to this, if we abstract out the details of ritual, cast creed, religion, location, age and other unimportant things (such as sex and feelings ;-)).
Marriage is essentially a three-way contract. Two parties -- the bride and groom, enter into the contract, with a third party as witness, arbiter, judge and sentencer in case of contractual violations (most often, in India, the thord party is most likely to also be the mastermind behind the whole deal in the first place).
With live-in relationships. the first two parties dispense with the third party -- the enforcing authority. So its purely a two-way contract between man and woman.
With this bare-bones definition, the pros and cons of each are easily open to analysis.
In the case of marriage, if the third party enforcer is too strong, bad marriages can stifle the partners. For live-in relationships, since both partners forfeit the protection offered by society/law, the weaker of the two partners is vulnerable to being exploited by the stronger.
But I suspect that most of these people who appear on talk shows and defend or advocate live-in relationships are actually living in a marriage, although they don't know it :-). In their case, social approval is often tacit, and their peer community (people they hung out with in college, their school friends, family) will take on the 'enforcer' role without anybody being the wiser :-).
This gives rise to Anshuman's law of procedural equivalence :-). In short, this law states that all things being equal, a relationship shall be deemed as a wedding as long as it can be proven that a three-way contract exists and is subscribed to by the concerned parties, either explicitly, or tacitly.
Sunday, January 16, 2005
back-to-the-future dept.
This has been splashed around in print and on the news all this week. I got around to reading it today, following a link from iMule's blog.
Makes one think (among many things) about the implications of population control. Is it really as bad as they say it is? Is having the second largest population in the world such a dubious distinction after all?
Japan and Europe are gradually becoming older, thanks to decades of falling birth-rates (mostly offshoots of economic prosperity and personal sexual independence). Productivity is falling (the report claims that this may allow India to match the GDP of some of the large European countries as soon as 2020!), but the fiscal burden of supporting an ageing population (health-care, social security) is coming back to haunt them.
On the contrary India and China are poised to launch into a sustained growth spurt on the coat-tails of a youthful, energetic population that is just waiting to be harnessed by market forces. This may take some time in coming to see radical shifts (if you feel the decade from 1995 was not radical enough :)) in the look and feel of our country. The report has a projection for Chinese and Indian GDP growth rates as percentages of US GDP for the next half-century or so -- the knee of the curve is somewhere in 2010, (A good time for me to be a grizzly ageing wolf, raising a pack of cubs ;)) so presumably that's when India will see the kind of growth spurt South-East Asia saw in the late 1980s/early 1990s. Super Highways will start getting built, cities will start getting monstrous new skylines (Cranes, Cranes, Cranes everywhere -- the Bangkok of 1992 of my memories) and fancy transport systems.
Coming back to the issue of population control, I have long felt that it is a moot point. Reources are scarce, and must be managed. Fair enough. But the truth is that they are taken by the strong and the weak die out for want of them. This is ground reality, and the world scarcely bats an eyelid as it perpetuates it. So why bother? The rest of the world is dying out (not for want of resources, but out of renunciation ;)) -- we (as Indians and Chinese) are in a position to seamlessly fill their shoes, taking the reins of the technologies they built up on the rising and ebbing tides of European and American rivalries and ambitions.
Have as many children as you like, really...Enough so that you can give them the essentials for their personal survival in this new age -- good education, nutrition, enlightened company and a good social network that makes the fulfillment of their aspirations more of a thing of collective concensus than something to really struggle for ;). If you can't do that or won't do that and that's your excuse for having a single child, get some ambition, god-dammit -- stoke that fire in your belly :).
A far more important issue for India to tackle in the coming years would be the seriously worrying disparity in the child-sex ratio across the country.
But I wonder if there's a study out there that compares historical shifts in global population growth rates (with migration factored in) with economic prosperity?
This has been splashed around in print and on the news all this week. I got around to reading it today, following a link from iMule's blog.
Makes one think (among many things) about the implications of population control. Is it really as bad as they say it is? Is having the second largest population in the world such a dubious distinction after all?
Japan and Europe are gradually becoming older, thanks to decades of falling birth-rates (mostly offshoots of economic prosperity and personal sexual independence). Productivity is falling (the report claims that this may allow India to match the GDP of some of the large European countries as soon as 2020!), but the fiscal burden of supporting an ageing population (health-care, social security) is coming back to haunt them.
On the contrary India and China are poised to launch into a sustained growth spurt on the coat-tails of a youthful, energetic population that is just waiting to be harnessed by market forces. This may take some time in coming to see radical shifts (if you feel the decade from 1995 was not radical enough :)) in the look and feel of our country. The report has a projection for Chinese and Indian GDP growth rates as percentages of US GDP for the next half-century or so -- the knee of the curve is somewhere in 2010, (A good time for me to be a grizzly ageing wolf, raising a pack of cubs ;)) so presumably that's when India will see the kind of growth spurt South-East Asia saw in the late 1980s/early 1990s. Super Highways will start getting built, cities will start getting monstrous new skylines (Cranes, Cranes, Cranes everywhere -- the Bangkok of 1992 of my memories) and fancy transport systems.
Coming back to the issue of population control, I have long felt that it is a moot point. Reources are scarce, and must be managed. Fair enough. But the truth is that they are taken by the strong and the weak die out for want of them. This is ground reality, and the world scarcely bats an eyelid as it perpetuates it. So why bother? The rest of the world is dying out (not for want of resources, but out of renunciation ;)) -- we (as Indians and Chinese) are in a position to seamlessly fill their shoes, taking the reins of the technologies they built up on the rising and ebbing tides of European and American rivalries and ambitions.
Have as many children as you like, really...Enough so that you can give them the essentials for their personal survival in this new age -- good education, nutrition, enlightened company and a good social network that makes the fulfillment of their aspirations more of a thing of collective concensus than something to really struggle for ;). If you can't do that or won't do that and that's your excuse for having a single child, get some ambition, god-dammit -- stoke that fire in your belly :).
A far more important issue for India to tackle in the coming years would be the seriously worrying disparity in the child-sex ratio across the country.
But I wonder if there's a study out there that compares historical shifts in global population growth rates (with migration factored in) with economic prosperity?
Saturday, January 01, 2005
analytical-poetry dept.
This just in. Maybe this is a crazy thought. But the mathematical analogue of poetry is really -- a digital signature. What is poetry but a condensation of a sensation or the rounding off of experience? In terse and simple words, the poet seeks to capture pain, rapture or equanimity in equal measure. A digital signature or message digest is of course, a lossy method for summarizing data content i.e. a digital signal. Now, Messrs. Shannon, Nyquist et al tell us, that downsampling a signal (effectively, trying to compress it beyond what its base information content allows) may cause us to lose information during the process, if the downsampled result is too terse.
From our hypothesis that poetry is the analogue of signal compression applied to linguistic expression, the same effect of ambiguity should apply.
At this point, it may be beneficial to introduce the notion of a well-intentioned poem, which we define as follows:
A poem written with a specific meaning in mind by the poet, with the clear intention of letting the readers of the poem be able to decipher the intended meaning.
Unfortunately, the available corpus of poetry that can be classified under this heading, is as we know, quite sparse.
Agreed? Shall we move on? Alright then, if we would have to demarcate good, skillfully-written poetry, it would now be reasonable to assume that such poems would be well-intentioned poems whose informational analysis would leave them hovering somewhere near the boundary where compression begins to become lossy.
Hmmm...can this intuition then, be encoded into a versification algorithm? Is poetry, as we know it, doomed to become the domain of cold-hearted automatons? Is there really no hope in this world for all those ugly people out there looking to get laid (well, actually, there's always beer)?
For answers to these and many other equally vexing questions, tune in next time...
This just in. Maybe this is a crazy thought. But the mathematical analogue of poetry is really -- a digital signature. What is poetry but a condensation of a sensation or the rounding off of experience? In terse and simple words, the poet seeks to capture pain, rapture or equanimity in equal measure. A digital signature or message digest is of course, a lossy method for summarizing data content i.e. a digital signal. Now, Messrs. Shannon, Nyquist et al tell us, that downsampling a signal (effectively, trying to compress it beyond what its base information content allows) may cause us to lose information during the process, if the downsampled result is too terse.
From our hypothesis that poetry is the analogue of signal compression applied to linguistic expression, the same effect of ambiguity should apply.
At this point, it may be beneficial to introduce the notion of a well-intentioned poem, which we define as follows:
A poem written with a specific meaning in mind by the poet, with the clear intention of letting the readers of the poem be able to decipher the intended meaning.
Unfortunately, the available corpus of poetry that can be classified under this heading, is as we know, quite sparse.
Agreed? Shall we move on? Alright then, if we would have to demarcate good, skillfully-written poetry, it would now be reasonable to assume that such poems would be well-intentioned poems whose informational analysis would leave them hovering somewhere near the boundary where compression begins to become lossy.
Hmmm...can this intuition then, be encoded into a versification algorithm? Is poetry, as we know it, doomed to become the domain of cold-hearted automatons? Is there really no hope in this world for all those ugly people out there looking to get laid (well, actually, there's always beer)?
For answers to these and many other equally vexing questions, tune in next time...
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