Do you think any of the Third World debtors would have gotten away with it if they had tried to pull the same stunt as Iceland? Any talk about how their "position as a sovereign state precludes legal process against their assets which are necessary for them to discharge in an acceptable manner their functions as a sovereign state" would only have elicited a "Nice try, just STFU and cough up the money". However, I'm sure the fact that they are not denizens of the civilized white western world would not have had anything to do with such a response. Not.Icelanders for their part feel that the EU has treated them as a financial colony while backing a neoliberal kleptocracy preying on an increasingly indebted population. In many ways Iceland is the tip of the iceberg – the proverbial canary in the coal mine showing the need to better cope with over-indebted economies. The EU and IMF-style austerity programs to pay off foreign debts that corrupt insiders have run up is not what was promised in 1991 (to) the post-Soviet economies or Third World debtors. It is not the promise of industrial capitalism. It is a financialized post-industrial dystopia, an imperial neofeudalism.
...
Instead of imposing the kind of austerity programs that devastated Third World countries from the 1970s to the 1990s and led them to avoid the IMF like a plague, the Althing is changing the rules of the financial system. It is subordinating Iceland’s reimbursement of Britain and Holland to the ability of Iceland’s economy to pay
Thursday, October 08, 2009
Here's a thought experiment
From an article about Iceland's huge debt to Britain and the Netherlands and how it's trying to wriggle out of it:
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
For a second there I thought you said '14 lakhs'
From The Hindu:
There's a bright side to this, though: all we have to do is hook up some magnets and coils of copper wire to Gandhi's mortal remains in Raj Ghat, and voila, an instant solution to our perennial power shortages.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s iconic Dandi March in 1930 to protest against the British salt tax has inspired pen-makers Mont Blanc to come out with a limited-series pen on the Father of the Nation.You can't make stuff up like this even if you tried: using somebody whose life was the epitome of simplicity to sell a fricking designer pen that costs Rs. 14 lakh.
The high-end pen is priced around Rs.14 lakh, according to a watch retailer.
The pen comes with a gold wire entwined by hand around the middle, which "evokes the roughly wound yarn on the spindle with which Gandhi spun everyday."
There's a bright side to this, though: all we have to do is hook up some magnets and coils of copper wire to Gandhi's mortal remains in Raj Ghat, and voila, an instant solution to our perennial power shortages.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Somebody please take the keyboard away from him
At this rate, he's not going to last long in politics. I think it's time the writer in him is locked up in a closet, at least as long as he's a minister. Here's an idea: whenever the urge to tweet seems to become overwhelming, summon one of your minions in the ministry and bawl him out -- this will have the added benefit of bringing in some discipline as well.
By the way, studies have shown that cutting down your twittering by even as little as five tweets a day can allow one to fit in an average of 1.2 extra engagements in an already 'ridiculously full' day.
By the way, studies have shown that cutting down your twittering by even as little as five tweets a day can allow one to fit in an average of 1.2 extra engagements in an already 'ridiculously full' day.
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Question
If The Lost Symbol is so hot, why am I being spammed with so many emails offering the book at big discounts, including exclusive offers from my credit card company (yeah, exclusive as in "only for our two million cardholders")?
Indiaplaza even went so far as to send an email masquerading as a review of the book, with the reviewer practically wetting themselves in their praise. Wait, I think I was too harsh -- reading the review more closely, it looks like a really different plot this time: last time it was a French scholar who requests a meeting with Langdon and dies before the meeting could take place, leaving behind a tantalizing clue, while this time it's an American professor who pulls more or less the same shit. My bad.
Update:The Onion chips in:
Indiaplaza even went so far as to send an email masquerading as a review of the book, with the reviewer practically wetting themselves in their praise. Wait, I think I was too harsh -- reading the review more closely, it looks like a really different plot this time: last time it was a French scholar who requests a meeting with Langdon and dies before the meeting could take place, leaving behind a tantalizing clue, while this time it's an American professor who pulls more or less the same shit. My bad.
Update:The Onion chips in:
Most chillingly, many agreed, is that while Michael Crichton's death has been a positive step, Dan Brown remains very much alive.
World Bank approves $4.3 billions in loan to India
Nothing particularly significant in this, except what a portion of the loan is meant for: to shore up the capital of some of the state-run banks. Two questions: 1) What is the need for a loan from the World Bank for this insignificant -- relatively speaking -- amount when we have something like $258 billion dollars of foreign exchange reserves? 2) Do these loans come attached with any conditions related to deregulation or 'financial innovation' that these banks must agree to?
Monday, September 21, 2009
The hydrogen bomb controversy
Today's Hindu carries an article about the controversy generated by Santhanam, in which M K Narayanan defends the government's position about the success of the thermonuclear test. Unfortunately, nearly all the points are pretty much untenable (unless he said something more, and it was not published). Samples:
One can understand where Narayanan is coming from: after all, proclaiming to the whole world that our hydrogen bombs are duds is not exactly good for the morale of the country and would cause our enemies quite a lot of satisfaction, but going after those who are interested in the truth doesn't serve any purpose, either.
The thermonuclear device had a yield of 45 kilotons. I have chosen my words carefully — 45 kilotons and nobody, including Mr. Santhanam who has absolutely no idea what he is talking about, can contest what is proven fact by the data which is thereI find it hard to believe that the DRDO project lead in charge of the whole thing (i.e. Santhanam) doesn't have a clue what he's talking about.
Asked about the doubt the former Army Chief, V.P. Malik, had raised about the efficacy of the hydrogen bomb, he said: “I think the person to answer that, is the present chief and not the past chief…”Just because someone has retired from his post, he doesn't lose whatever credentials he may have built up over his career. Reading along:
“We have thermonuclear capabilities. I am absolutely sure. We are very clear on this point. If you hit a city with one of these you are talking about 50,000 to 1,00,000 deaths,” the NSA said.Just saying so repeatedly will not cut it. Also, does anybody else find such casual mention of deaths more horrifying than Santhanam's statements?
One can understand where Narayanan is coming from: after all, proclaiming to the whole world that our hydrogen bombs are duds is not exactly good for the morale of the country and would cause our enemies quite a lot of satisfaction, but going after those who are interested in the truth doesn't serve any purpose, either.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Haskell, monads, graph theory and the puzzle that took 19 years to solve
Well, 'solve' is actually a misnomer, since it turns out that the puzzle doesn't have a solution (at least that's what my code tells me). Here's the puzzle:
Given the figure below, find a path from point A to point B that crosses every edge line segment exactly once:
I came upon this when I was in college, and spent an hour or so on it, trying out different paths by hand, but could not find a solution.
Nineteen years later, The Communications of the ACM carries an article on the P=NP question, which triggers an impulse in me to read up more on the complexity of algorithms, and I learn about graph theory, DFS, BFS, the entire works. Quite a fascinating subject. Anyway, the upshot of all this is that I realize that there is a formal method of solving the puzzle that had piqued my curiosity nearly two decades ago.
Coincidentally, my copy of Real World Haskell arrives at my doorstep at around the same time I am thinking of whipping up some code to solve the puzzle. Learn Haskell, solve puzzle. One stone, two birds.
The first thing is to come up with the data structures. Not too difficult (apologies for the screwed up formatting -- getting all the tabs correct in Blogger would probably take me four hours):
type Node = Int
type Edge = (Node, Node)
type Path = [Node]
type Graph = ([Node],[Edge])
theGraph :: Graph
theGraph = ([1,2,3,4,5,6], [(1,2),(1,3),(1,4),(1,2),
(2,3),(3,4),(1,4),(2,5),
(3,5),(3,6),(4,6),(1,5),
(5,6),(1,6),(1,5),(1,6)])
One of the options I considered initially was to model the direction of the path, something along the lines of
type Path = [(Edge,Direction)]
with Direction indicating whether we are going forward or backward, but it turns out that this was not required.
Having gotten the data structures in place, it's just a question of routine code to put together the helper functions that will be needed:
-- to check whether two edges are the same [(1,2) is equal to (2,1)]
edgeEq :: Edge -> Edge -> Bool
edgeEq e1 e2 = e11 == e21 && e12 == e22 ||
e11 == e22 && e12 == e21
where e11 = fst e1
e12 = snd e1
e21 = fst e2
e22 = snd e2
-- get all the edges joined at a node
getEdges :: Node -> [Edge]
getEdges node = [edge | edge <- snd theGraph, fst edge == node || snd edge == node]
-- get the node at the other end of an edge
getOtherEnd :: Node -> Edge ->Node
getOtherEnd node edge = if fst edge == node then snd edge else fst edge
-- get all the neighbours for a node
getNeighbours :: Node -> [Node]
getNeighbours node = map (getOtherEnd node) (getEdges node)
-- converts a path into a list of edges (e.g. [1,2,3,2] to [(1,2),(2,3),(3,2)]
buildEdges :: Path -> [Edge]
buildEdges path | null path || length path == 1 = []
| otherwise = (head path, head (tail path)) : buildEdges (tail path)
-- get the list of neighbouring nodes that are yet to be visited in the current path
getUnvisitedNeighbours :: Node -> Path -> [Node]
getUnvisitedNeighbours node path = map (getOtherEnd node) untravelledEdges
where untravelledEdges = deleteFirstsBy edgeEq (getEdges node) (buildEdges path)
-- check whether a given path is a solution
isSolution :: Path -> Bool
isSolution path = head path == 5 && last path == 6 && length path == length (snd theGraph) + 1
The astute reader will observe that the graph object -- is it OK to call things 'objects' in Haskell? -- is baked into the solution; I initially had a version where the graph object was passed as a parameter to every function, but this made things more verbose, and anyway, my objective was not to produce a graph library, but to solve the puzzle.
With that out of the way, time to move on to the actual algorithm. The algorithm is a DFS brute search, where we start at a node (note that the area outside the figure is also modelled as a node), choose one of its unvisited neighbours, choose one of the neighbour's unvisited neighbours, and so on, till we run out of neighbours to visit. Check the path to see if we have covered all the edges and if the path is bookended by the start and end nodes that are of interest to us, and we have our solution. An NP-hard problem, BTW.
It's obvious that recursion is needed here, but I was not sure how to handle the enumeration of the different branches, the backtracking from a dead end, and so on in Haskell, considering that looping is frowned upon, and the strongly typed nature of the language implies that both the if and else clauses should return the same type, i.e. you cannot do the equivalent of:
if <path is a solution>
then <print solution>
else <add next neighbour and try again>
While working on the solution, I was also reading up on monads, and man, are they a pain to wrap your head around. But luckily I ran into [*] Monads as containers (and its sibling Monads as computation, which I'm still digesting), where I learned that a list is also a monad, and we can do stuff like take a list, apply a function that produces a list, and end up with a flat list, so to speak (yeah, we don't need monads for this, a simple map and concat are enough, but I learned this in hindsight, after realizing that >>= was exactly what I was looking for). Anyway, that sort of nails the algorithm:
-- build a list of candidate paths for a given path
getNextChoices :: Path -> [Path]
getNextChoices path = nub (unvisitedNodes >>= (\x -> [reverse (x : reverse path)])) -- hack to append to end of a list
where unvisitedNodes = getUnvisitedNeighbours (last path) path
-- filter out all the solutions from a given list of candidate paths
findSolutions :: [Path] -> [Path]
findSolutions paths = filter isSolution (nub paths)
-- find all the solutions starting from a given list of candidate paths.
-- invoked with a single node path, i.e. solve [[1]]
solve :: [Path] -> [Path]
solve paths = if null choices
then findSolutions paths
else solve choices
where choices = (paths >>= getNextChoices)
solve' :: [Path]
solve' = solve [[5]]
From All About Monads:
And now for the denouement, which by the way, takes a looong time (remember the NP-hardness):
*Main> solve'
[]
Nope, still no solution.
[*] It doesn't reflect too well on a book if I still have to rely on Google to help me out. I'm looking at you, "Real World Haskell".
Given the figure below, find a path from point A to point B that crosses every edge line segment exactly once:
I came upon this when I was in college, and spent an hour or so on it, trying out different paths by hand, but could not find a solution.
Nineteen years later, The Communications of the ACM carries an article on the P=NP question, which triggers an impulse in me to read up more on the complexity of algorithms, and I learn about graph theory, DFS, BFS, the entire works. Quite a fascinating subject. Anyway, the upshot of all this is that I realize that there is a formal method of solving the puzzle that had piqued my curiosity nearly two decades ago.
Coincidentally, my copy of Real World Haskell arrives at my doorstep at around the same time I am thinking of whipping up some code to solve the puzzle. Learn Haskell, solve puzzle. One stone, two birds.
The first thing is to come up with the data structures. Not too difficult (apologies for the screwed up formatting -- getting all the tabs correct in Blogger would probably take me four hours):
type Node = Int
type Edge = (Node, Node)
type Path = [Node]
type Graph = ([Node],[Edge])
theGraph :: Graph
theGraph = ([1,2,3,4,5,6], [(1,2),(1,3),(1,4),(1,2),
(2,3),(3,4),(1,4),(2,5),
(3,5),(3,6),(4,6),(1,5),
(5,6),(1,6),(1,5),(1,6)])
One of the options I considered initially was to model the direction of the path, something along the lines of
type Path = [(Edge,Direction)]
with Direction indicating whether we are going forward or backward, but it turns out that this was not required.
Having gotten the data structures in place, it's just a question of routine code to put together the helper functions that will be needed:
-- to check whether two edges are the same [(1,2) is equal to (2,1)]
edgeEq :: Edge -> Edge -> Bool
edgeEq e1 e2 = e11 == e21 && e12 == e22 ||
e11 == e22 && e12 == e21
where e11 = fst e1
e12 = snd e1
e21 = fst e2
e22 = snd e2
-- get all the edges joined at a node
getEdges :: Node -> [Edge]
getEdges node = [edge | edge <- snd theGraph, fst edge == node || snd edge == node]
-- get the node at the other end of an edge
getOtherEnd :: Node -> Edge ->Node
getOtherEnd node edge = if fst edge == node then snd edge else fst edge
-- get all the neighbours for a node
getNeighbours :: Node -> [Node]
getNeighbours node = map (getOtherEnd node) (getEdges node)
-- converts a path into a list of edges (e.g. [1,2,3,2] to [(1,2),(2,3),(3,2)]
buildEdges :: Path -> [Edge]
buildEdges path | null path || length path == 1 = []
| otherwise = (head path, head (tail path)) : buildEdges (tail path)
-- get the list of neighbouring nodes that are yet to be visited in the current path
getUnvisitedNeighbours :: Node -> Path -> [Node]
getUnvisitedNeighbours node path = map (getOtherEnd node) untravelledEdges
where untravelledEdges = deleteFirstsBy edgeEq (getEdges node) (buildEdges path)
-- check whether a given path is a solution
isSolution :: Path -> Bool
isSolution path = head path == 5 && last path == 6 && length path == length (snd theGraph) + 1
The astute reader will observe that the graph object -- is it OK to call things 'objects' in Haskell? -- is baked into the solution; I initially had a version where the graph object was passed as a parameter to every function, but this made things more verbose, and anyway, my objective was not to produce a graph library, but to solve the puzzle.
With that out of the way, time to move on to the actual algorithm. The algorithm is a DFS brute search, where we start at a node (note that the area outside the figure is also modelled as a node), choose one of its unvisited neighbours, choose one of the neighbour's unvisited neighbours, and so on, till we run out of neighbours to visit. Check the path to see if we have covered all the edges and if the path is bookended by the start and end nodes that are of interest to us, and we have our solution. An NP-hard problem, BTW.
It's obvious that recursion is needed here, but I was not sure how to handle the enumeration of the different branches, the backtracking from a dead end, and so on in Haskell, considering that looping is frowned upon, and the strongly typed nature of the language implies that both the if and else clauses should return the same type, i.e. you cannot do the equivalent of:
if <path is a solution>
then <print solution>
else <add next neighbour and try again>
While working on the solution, I was also reading up on monads, and man, are they a pain to wrap your head around. But luckily I ran into [*] Monads as containers (and its sibling Monads as computation, which I'm still digesting), where I learned that a list is also a monad, and we can do stuff like take a list, apply a function that produces a list, and end up with a flat list, so to speak (yeah, we don't need monads for this, a simple map and concat are enough, but I learned this in hindsight, after realizing that >>= was exactly what I was looking for). Anyway, that sort of nails the algorithm:
-- build a list of candidate paths for a given path
getNextChoices :: Path -> [Path]
getNextChoices path = nub (unvisitedNodes >>= (\x -> [reverse (x : reverse path)])) -- hack to append to end of a list
where unvisitedNodes = getUnvisitedNeighbours (last path) path
-- filter out all the solutions from a given list of candidate paths
findSolutions :: [Path] -> [Path]
findSolutions paths = filter isSolution (nub paths)
-- find all the solutions starting from a given list of candidate paths.
-- invoked with a single node path, i.e. solve [[1]]
solve :: [Path] -> [Path]
solve paths = if null choices
then findSolutions paths
else solve choices
where choices = (paths >>= getNextChoices)
solve' :: [Path]
solve' = solve [[5]]
From All About Monads:
One use of functions which return lists is to represent ambiguous computations -- that is computations which may have 0, 1, or more allowed outcomes. In a computation composed from ambiguous subcomputations, the ambiguity may compound, or it may eventually resolve into a single allowed outcome or no allowed outcome at all. During this process, the set of possible computational states is represented as a list. The List monad thus embodies a strategy for performing simultaneous computations along all allowed paths of an ambiguous computation.The above algorithm is not exactly an ambiguous computation, but the bit about "performing simultaneous computations along all allowed paths" sure resonates with its structure.
And now for the denouement, which by the way, takes a looong time (remember the NP-hardness):
*Main> solve'
[]
Nope, still no solution.
[*] It doesn't reflect too well on a book if I still have to rely on Google to help me out. I'm looking at you, "Real World Haskell".
Sunday, September 06, 2009
Thank you
Here's an example of what's wrong with our country:
Salsa-dancing, shopping-at-Marks-and-Spencers investment bankers -- yeah, this is the most representative Indian demographic.
And using Phil Collins' Another Day in Paradise as the investment banker's favourite song? These guys won't know it if irony jumped up and bit them on their asses.
Salsa-dancing, shopping-at-Marks-and-Spencers investment bankers -- yeah, this is the most representative Indian demographic.
And using Phil Collins' Another Day in Paradise as the investment banker's favourite song? These guys won't know it if irony jumped up and bit them on their asses.
Thought for the day
A helpful analogy to understand the value of static typing is to look at it as putting pieces into a jigsaw puzzle. In Haskell, if a piece has the wrong shape, it simply won't fit. In a dynamically typed language, all the pieces are 1x1 squares and always fit, so you have to constantly examine the resulting picture and check (through testing) whether it's correct.
-- From Real World Haskell
-- From Real World Haskell
Saturday, August 29, 2009
Little things
Firefox: Allow one the option of saving the password for a web site after the site has received the password and has indicated successful authentication.
IE: Prompt for saving the password before sending the request, which may result in storing an incorrect password (because of a typo).
IE: Prompt for saving the password before sending the request, which may result in storing an incorrect password (because of a typo).
Is it just me
... or does this image remind one of -- never mind.
(yeah, that's right, guy #1, move your left hand towards guy #3, just a little higher... perfect! Hold it right there. Guy #3, take your left hand, and...)
(yeah, that's right, guy #1, move your left hand towards guy #3, just a little higher... perfect! Hold it right there. Guy #3, take your left hand, and...)
Exports to touch same level as last year?
... according to this story. Quite unlikely, considering the quite steep year-on-year dips in the export figures for the initial months of the year.
Saturday, August 22, 2009
Bloggots
Dear Farrukh Dhondy,
I have been a regular reader of your columns in The Deccan Chronicle, and have always enjoyed your wit and intelligent insights. However, you have outdone yourself today:
Sincerely yours,
Bloggot #76981
P.S. About the whole Afghanistan thing: I suggest you Google for these terms: "grand chessboard", "Melvin Lattimore" and "Ali Mohammed". Spending some time at History Commons and the RI Data Dump won't hurt, either.
P.P.S. And I have been wondering about this for a long time: who the $%@& is Bachchoo?
I have been a regular reader of your columns in The Deccan Chronicle, and have always enjoyed your wit and intelligent insights. However, you have outdone yourself today:
Neither is there much evidence in favour of the bloggots (blogging idiots) who contend that Afghanistan is strategically important because someone somewhere wants to lay a pipeline through it to send petrol or gas to someone else and earn zillions of dollars thereby. Look at a contour map of Afghanistan (and get a life)!Bloggots. Take two unrelated words, 'blogging' and 'idiots', conflate them together, thereby forming a new word that was simply begging to be coined, a word that succinctly captures the misplaced contempt that professional columnists (aka people who have a life as compared to us poor bloggots) have for folks who are doing an end run around them, and that too for free, and voila, there's your winner for the next year's competition.
Sincerely yours,
Bloggot #76981
P.S. About the whole Afghanistan thing: I suggest you Google for these terms: "grand chessboard", "Melvin Lattimore" and "Ali Mohammed". Spending some time at History Commons and the RI Data Dump won't hurt, either.
P.P.S. And I have been wondering about this for a long time: who the $%@& is Bachchoo?
Pension funds
Here's an example (via Mish Shedlock) of the dangers we would be exposing ourselves to if we allowed our pension funds to be invested in -- ahem -- "non-moribund investment patterns":
As of March 31, Calpers's $17.6 billion real-estate portfolio, a majority of which is invested in commercial properties while about 5% is invested in residential, reported a one-year decline of about 35% in its value.I'd take a measly inflation-adjusted single digit return any day, thank you very much.
Friday, August 14, 2009
India aims for robust GDP growth despite drought
The Commerce Minister has opined that we can maintain our GDP growth in the current year at the same level as the previous one. Good to know that; the only problem is that the entire article contains not a single factual argument that supports his statement. Things like
I came across this piece immediately after reading an investment advisory about the impact of the drought on the economy -- the detailed analysis it contains shows up the hollowness of these statements even more starkly.
"Our domestic demand and consumption is strong. Fundamentally, our economy is strong"and
"India keeps substantial buffer stocks of food grains after our two successive years of buffer [Ed: I think he meant 'bumper'] crops. We have enough of what we have to sustain availability of food"and
"We are not overlooking the challenges that we have. At the same time, we are not overwhelmed by them...we hope that this situation will not be there when the next sowing season comes in January"are not exactly confidence-inspiring, absent any convincing arguments.
I came across this piece immediately after reading an investment advisory about the impact of the drought on the economy -- the detailed analysis it contains shows up the hollowness of these statements even more starkly.
Adieu to social networking
Last week I deleted my Facebook and Orkut profiles, for reasons I've mentioned elsewhere. I am going to delete my Twitter and LinkedIn accounts as well, but haven't gotten around to it yet. Maybe I'll spare LinkedIn, but Twitter has to go -- no two ways about it.
Friday, August 07, 2009
Wednesday, August 05, 2009
You give research a bad name - Part 2
From Yahoo:
A new piece of research suggests that what an organization promises to employees-training opportunities, benefits, compensation, etc.-do not matter nearly as much as what the organization actually delivers.Gee, who would've thunk that?
Samantha Montes and co-author David Zweig, professors at the Rotman School of Management and the University of Toronto Scarborough, have found that the influence of promises has little effect on employee's emotional reactions toward the organization, their intentions to stay with the organization, and intentions to engage in citizenship behaviours.
In their study paper, the authors write that people care more about what they receive from their organization, not what they were promised.
Tuesday, August 04, 2009
Operators are standing by as we speak
Yeah, that's exactly what the world needs more of right now: a gold-plated guest house complex, when millions are suffering from disease, malnutrition and other crises.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Here's an idea
Abdul Kalam's supposed humiliation at the hands of the Continental Airlines security staff has kicked off a much needed debate on the privileges our so called VIPs enjoy. Here's an idea: instead of referring to these folks as VIPs, why not start calling them SLs (short for Security Liability)? This would a) take away the sheen associated with the original tag and b) lower the cost to the exchequer (the assumption being that the politicos would be shamed into requesting that they do not want to be provided security, owing to the negative connotation of the new tag).
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
The Rajapaksa interview
The Hindu is carrying an interview with the Sri Lankan president. Most of his answers are politically correct and are what we want to hear -- man, he's one smooth operator, alright -- but this one exposes his true colours:
BTW, in case you haven't done so already, go and read 'And then they came for me', Lasantha Wickrematunge's voice from beyond the grave -- without doubt the most poignant thing I've read in a long while.
Q: There has been international concern over the assaults and pressures on journalists in Sri Lanka. Some of these journalists were your personal friends, especially Lasantha Wickrematunge [Editor of The Sunday Leader] who was gunned down in January 2009. Then, in June, a Tamil woman journalist [Krishni Ifhan née Kandasamy of Internews] was abducted in Colombo by unidentified persons [who questioned her for several hours before releasing her in Kandy].Nice dodge.
A: Most of these cases were created, I would say. If you fight someone in the street and that man comes and hits you, can the government take responsibility? But we have not done anything against journalists even when they attack us.
BTW, in case you haven't done so already, go and read 'And then they came for me', Lasantha Wickrematunge's voice from beyond the grave -- without doubt the most poignant thing I've read in a long while.
Monday, July 06, 2009
Eight queens problem in Lisp
(defun solve-n-queens (n)
(let ((solutions nil))
(defun solve-internal (board k)
(if (eq k (- n 1))
(dolist (x1 (solve board k))
(push x1 solutions))
(dolist (x2 (solve board k))
(solve-internal x2 (+ k 1)))))
(solve-internal (make-board n) 0)
solutions))
(defun solve (board k)
(let ((solutions nil))
(dotimes (i (length board))
(if (present? i k (get-safe-squares board))
(push (place-queen (clone-board board) (list i k)) solutions)))
solutions))
Helper procedures left as an exercise for the gentle reader.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
*This* is how you do it
Their names differ just by one letter, but their career paths can't be more divergent. While one is an over-hyped and pampered underachiever whose claim to fame owes more to her tight T-shirts and short skirts, the other has been quietly flying under the radar, establishing a name for herself on the world stage.
Judicial overreach
From The Hindu:
The Supreme Court on Monday directed the Centre to file an affidavit by June 26 on the steps taken to ensure the safety and security of Indian students under racial attacks in Australia and Canada.It's nice that there's somebody to pull the government up for its non-performance, but is this the job of the judiciary? Last time I checked, their role was to interpret the law and the constitution, nothing more.
Friday, June 19, 2009
Harish Khare appointed PM's media advisor
Looks like all the years of slanted op-eds supporting the Congress party have finally paid off.
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Subramaniam Swamy on EVMs
There is an op-ed by Subramaniam Swamy on EVMs in today's Hindu . He raises a lot of pertinent points, one of which is quite damning (italics mine):
Update (May 6, 2010): Vindication from a University of Michigan study.
For example, the respected International Electrical & Electronics Engineering Journal (IEEE, May 2009, p.23) has published an article by two eminent professors of computer science, titled “Trustworthy Voting.” They conclude that although electronic voting machines do offer a myriad of benefits, these cannot be reaped unless nine suggested safeguards are put in place for protecting the integrity of the outcome. None of these nine safeguards, however, is in place in Indian EVMs.I googled for this article, to confirm whether there was any merit to his allegation, but the article is behind a pay wall. Another interesting point he raises is the employment of convicted hackers by a political party just before the elections (no prizes for guessing which party):
On the eve of the 2009 elections in India, I raised the issue at a press conference in Chennai, pointing out that a political party just before the elections had recruited those who had been convicted in the U.S. for hacking bank accounts on the Internet and credit cards.If these allegations are true, my already low level of confidence in these machines just went down another notch.
Update (May 6, 2010): Vindication from a University of Michigan study.
Saturday, June 13, 2009
A fool and his money ...
Today I shelled out $5 to buy the PDF version of the Blue Book when I could have had it for free. And to think that the money could have been put to better use, like helping out Arthur Silber, for example, makes it all the more painful. Grrr.
Here's a business opportunity
From an article in the latest issue of the Communications of the ACM that analyses the reasons for the limited success of the OLPC:
... if the machine fails, it is up to the family to replace it or the child must do without.Time for someone to step in with an insurance policy, methinks.
Friday, June 12, 2009
Tin foil hat time
Considering that Tech Mahindra is facing difficulties in dealing with the spurt in the share price of Satyam, this statement by the Satyam chairman seems suspiciously like an attempt to drive down the price to levels comparable to the open offer price. I dare say anybody in his right mind would deliberately talk down a company this way otherwise:
"It is hugely overstaffed, costs are very high, and the revenue picture in the immediate future is not that great."
Sunday, June 07, 2009
General Motors or Chevrolet?
General Motors have taken a full page ad in the newspapers to convince the world that their Indian operations are going strong, no reason to doubt their solvency, yada yada. If you look at the ad, you will find exactly one mention of 'General Motors': the line below the CEO's name and designation (well, two if you count the GM logo in a picture of one of their factories). It's 'Chevrolet' everywhere else: it's almost like they want to dissociate themselves from the G-word -- which is sort of schizophrenic, considering the intent of the ad.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
EVMs
Both Jayalalitha and Subramaniam Swamy have questioned the authenticity of the recently concluded general elections. While they have not substantiated their allegations, consider these facts:
- Media organizations were prohibited from conducting exit polls.
- Navin Chawla was accused by ex-CEC Gopalaswami to be partisan, going so far as taking bathroom breaks during crucial election planning meetings, and passing on information about the happenings to the Congress netas.
- There is no verifiable paper audit trail that independently proves that my vote was registered for the candidate of my choice.
- The candidate's name is linked to the voting button via a strip of paper stuck to the top of the voting machine (rough analogy: numbers stuck to a phone keypad). How do we know that the paper is really in sync with the candidate details fed into the machine? For that matter, how do we even know for sure that two buttons are not connected to the same candidate?
- There is a huge disconnect between then opinion polls and the actual results.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Got work?
From ABC News via Mish's blog:
Casey Savage graduated from Trinity College in Hartford with a 3.8 grade-point average and honors. What he doesn't have is a job.It's a bad situation, alright, but I can't feel too much sympathy for someone whose goal -- right out of college, no less -- is to take up a career where one's job: a) doesn't add anything to the real economy b) involves either a Ponzi scheme or blowing up the next bubble and c) screwing over old widows and pensioners.
"I've talked to 24 different firms so far. Hedge funds, investment banks, private equity shops," Savage said. "And I just feel that there's limited opportunities at this point."
Friday, May 22, 2009
You can't make this stuff up
First IPL2 semi-final: Delhi Daredevils' Dilshan, a Sri Lankan, hits a boundary and is applauded by somebody holding a sign that reads (in Tamil) Tamizhanda!!.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
MotoGP
I haven't been paying attention to MotoGP for a while, so I don't know how long the unedifying practice of changing bikes during the race has been in place. Doesn't really matter: it sucks big time, and takes away an important aspect where MotoGP scored over Formula One.
Maybe it's my belief in the KISS principle, but the idea of starting and finishing the race non-stop and relying only on your driving skills -- as opposed to the scheming and tactics associated with pit stops, fueling, tyre change, etc. -- appeals immensely to me. While we are at it, why not dispense with having two drivers and cars per team as well? It leads to charges of favoritism and ill feelings between the drivers, and results in violations of the spirit of racing when one driver is instructed to let his partner win in the interests of the team.
There is also a financial benefit to the no pit stops strategy -- think of all the money saved because you don't need such a large crew in every race.
Maybe it's my belief in the KISS principle, but the idea of starting and finishing the race non-stop and relying only on your driving skills -- as opposed to the scheming and tactics associated with pit stops, fueling, tyre change, etc. -- appeals immensely to me. While we are at it, why not dispense with having two drivers and cars per team as well? It leads to charges of favoritism and ill feelings between the drivers, and results in violations of the spirit of racing when one driver is instructed to let his partner win in the interests of the team.
There is also a financial benefit to the no pit stops strategy -- think of all the money saved because you don't need such a large crew in every race.
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Nation.pk
There's this web site called nation.pk that keeps passing off lies as news. The latest one is a news item that Seymour Hersh claimed in an interview to an Arab TV channel that Dick Cheney ordered the assassination of Benazir Bhutto -- a claim that has been debunked quite thoroughly. I would have let this go if it had been a one-off thing, but these guys did it earlier too, trying to pass off a controversial but unattributed quote to Robin Cook (I tried searcing for this in their web site, but it looks like they pulled that story).
Prabakaran
The Hindu is carrying a 1986 interview with Prabakaran as part of the news coverage of his death. While one must take his answers with a pinch of salt -- he was living in India at the time, and this was before the IPKF operations -- I can't help but think that republishing the interview is going to have the unintentional effect of building sympathy for him, and gloss over the transmogrification that has happened over the 23 years since then.
Friday, May 15, 2009
Huh?
According to this story, retail sales fell in April by 0.4%, while according to this one, they were up by 1.2% in the same month. Both stories are carried by Yahoo Finance (sourced from Bloomberg and NYTimes via Indian Express), and both were posted within minutes of each other, probably by the same journalist -- as indicated by the URL. Mind you, it could be that one of these numbers is year-on-year while the other is month over month, but it's still sloppy journalism if I have to figure this out on my own.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Here we go again
The reason for Monday's fall in the Sensex is the "uncertainty over government formation". Which brings up the question: what was the level of uncertainty a few days ago, when the Sensex was moving upward? I don't know who is to be blamed for this: the market players who try to pass off such after-the-fact rationalizations, or the reporters who quote these jackasses mindlessly.
A Recent WTF
This DailyWTF story reminds me of something similar that happened to me recently. I created a user account in one of the government web sites -- I think it was to pay the water tax -- and there was no option to specify a password during account creation. I thought I would receive an email containing a link for activating the account and specifying a password, but nope, no confirmation email. When I tried to log in using the newly created user name, however, I found a password field guarded by the usual annoying JavaScript alert. I guess you can see where I'm going with this by now: disabling JavaScript bypassed this validation and I was shooed in without any ado.
I haven't tried accessing the site again after this, so I don't know whether this state of affairs persists. Considering that this is a government web site, I wouldn't be surprised if it does.
I haven't tried accessing the site again after this, so I don't know whether this state of affairs persists. Considering that this is a government web site, I wouldn't be surprised if it does.
Monday, May 11, 2009
Saturday, May 09, 2009
Dude, I think you're missing the whole point
From a letter in The Hindu:
Ajmal's trial is nothing but taking democracy too far. Only a person whose guilt is in doubt should be given an opportunity to defend himeself, not one who is is responsible for killing innocent people indiscriminately.Pray tell, how do we decide that someone's guilt is in doubt or not, without going through the whole judicial process (a.k.a. 'trial')?
Tuesday, May 05, 2009
IPL 2.0
Random thoughts:
- Quite a few of the umpiring decisions have been abysmal. Is it because they couldn't get the good ones to travel to South Africa at short notice?
- Where did they get the cheerleaders from? Hookers 'R Us?
- The commentators, as usual, outdo each other with their cliches and insincere attempts at drumming up the excitement (see #5 and #6).
- You have great ads like the Vodafone zoozoos that cost next to nothing, and then you have Airtel's contrived romantic crap featuring jaded, overpaid stars.
- A team needing less than ten runs in the last over with four or more wickets in hand does *not* constitute a thrilling finish in T20 cricket, contrary to what Ravi Shastri or Harsha Bogle says.
- It's not a DLF Maximum, it's a fricken sixer, dumbasses.
- It's been more fun reading the Fake IPL Player's blog than watching most of the matches.
- Speaking of the KKR, I haven't experienced this much schadenfreude in a long while (evil grin).
- Trivia: The father and son in the ad where the mother berates the father for being irresponsible are father and son in real life too. I think.
Monday, May 04, 2009
Easy there, Sparky
From The Independent:
Boy, everyone must be breathless by now, from all the Web 3.0 bubble-blowing.
The biggest internet revolution for a generation will be unveiled this month with the launch of software that will understand questions and give specific, tailored answers in a way that the web has never managed before.Revolution: check. Holy Grail: check. Massive interest among pundits: check. Evolutionary leap: check. New paradigm: check.
The new system, Wolfram Alpha, showcased at Harvard University in the US last week, takes the first step towards what many consider to be the internet's Holy Grail – a global store of information that understands and responds to ordinary language in the same way a person does.
Boy, everyone must be breathless by now, from all the Web 3.0 bubble-blowing.
Sunday, May 03, 2009
Reddit vs Slashdot
I had stopped reading Slashdot a while ago, as Reddit had started having more interesting/new stuff. Things have changed between then and now: Reddit has morphed into a sort of dumping ground for all kinds of crap -- witness the number of 'Vote up if you hate...' and 'Dear Reddit, I wrote a new JavaScript Sudoku solver. Tell me what you think' posts that make it to the front page. Slashdot continues to have more focus, with a much higher signal to noise ratio -- no doubt owing to more editorial control over the content. It also continues to be one of the few places where the quality of the discussion consistently exceeds that of the content.
To be fair, Reddit does provide some value with the NSFW^H^H^H^H funny pictures and videos, but a good source for the latest news? Not anymore.
To be fair, Reddit does provide some value with the NSFW^H^H^H^H funny pictures and videos, but a good source for the latest news? Not anymore.
Saturday, May 02, 2009
Get off my lawn
I have been meaning to write about this for a long time, but considering that the size of my friends list in Facebook has exceeded the magical number of four, now is as good a time as any other: this may just be a generational thing, but every time I see a Facebook/Orkut page with the pokes, scraps and assorted other crap, my fingers start twitching involuntarily, trying to reach for the nearest neck to choke. The exposure of the messages in one's scrapbook/wall/whatever to everybody in the friends list is, to me, the equivalent of making the password to your email account public. Even if the messages are in the nature of 'Hi!!!! Great to get in touch with you!!! lol!!' (I'm not even going to comment on the language or the presence of the extra exclamation marks), I still consider such exposure a violation of my privacy.
P.S. And dude, there's a word for using $HOT_HOLLYWOOD_HUNK's picture as your avatar or whatever the fsck it is called: loser.
Gah.
P.S. And dude, there's a word for using $HOT_HOLLYWOOD_HUNK's picture as your avatar or whatever the fsck it is called: loser.
Gah.
Dear Tata Sky
The way you disallow any control of the content for the first ten seconds or so after switching on the set top box and ram your promos down the viewers' throats is extremely presumptuous and shows that you don't give a tiny rat's ass about your customers. Believe me, the last thing a person wants to experience just as he's sitting down for some hopefully decent entertainment is impotent rage at the non-functioning remote.
You give research a bad name
I don't think they could have picked a more irrelevant topic for research if they had tried. Coming soon to an academic journal near you: 'Correlation between the colour of the suits worn by CEOs and the year-on-year growth in the quarterly profits reported by their companies'.
Kamran reported
Rajastan Royals' Kamran Khan has been reported for a suspect bowling action. Excuse me, if Kamran's action is suspect, Lasith Malinga should be banned from coming within 100 yards of the bowling crease. I can't for the life of me imagine why no umpire has had the guts to report him so far (unless it's because of the power wielded by the Asian lobby in international cricket affairs). Staying on the subject of cricket affairs, Lalith Modi is beginning to look more and more like a Mini-Me version of Jagmohan Dalmia.
Friday, May 01, 2009
Government launches new pension scheme
Ignoring the convenient timing of the announcement -- frankly, the postponing of the announcement by a month doesn't really cut it -- the idea of a pension scheme in which one can invest up to 50% in the stock market is simply abominable. Here's a suggestion: why don't they rename it from NPS to 401K?
Update: Now the IT sector is contemplating a switch to the new scheme. The article touts a number of benefits of the new scheme over EPF:
Update: Now the IT sector is contemplating a switch to the new scheme. The article touts a number of benefits of the new scheme over EPF:
NPS scores over EPFO on several counts. While EPFO follows a moribund investment pattern with no equity exposure, NPS allows members to design their own retirement portfolio and offers six different fund managers to choose from. EPFO's service delivery and account keeping is de-centralised and a recent audit found that over 90% of EPF members' accounts are inaccurately maintained. With a professional central record-keeping agency in place, NPS is better placed on this front.Frankly, except for the better record-keeping, the rest of the reasons are in no way deal-clinchers (note how the EPFO's lack of exposure to the equity market is dismissed as a "moribund investment pattern"). Also, good luck with backing the horse -- aka 'fund manager' -- most likely to win.
Workers can check their pension fund balances online, far advanced than the delayed annual contribution slips EPFO sends.
The family that flips together
Check out this picture of Amitabh Bachchan proudly giving the bird to everybody (I couldn't locate the online version of the image where the entire Bachchan clan is indulging in unintentional rudeness). Somebody in the polling booth is having a good laugh about the whole thing.
Props to Priya Dutt for realizing the stupidity of holding up a finger (middle or otherwise) and showing her whole hand instead.
Props to Priya Dutt for realizing the stupidity of holding up a finger (middle or otherwise) and showing her whole hand instead.
Thursday, April 23, 2009
MARIE Simulator for VisualWorks
Here is a VisualWorks implementation of the MARIE Simulator that I put together. Compiler included.
Friday, April 10, 2009
Why am I not surprised?
After sleeping for three years, the CBI wakes up and questions the jurisdiction of the trial court hearing the case against Jagdish Tytler. Does this have anything to do with the fact that the Congress party feels that its poll fortunes are in jeopardy because of the clean chit given to Tytler? Of course not -- the CBI is an independent agency, not under anybody's control. Right?
Thursday, April 09, 2009
Yeah, right
From The Hindu:
Real estate developers are warning that if (potential home-buyers) wait too long, there could be dire consequences for a number of support industries, millions of unskilled labourers and the wider economy itself... (Prakash Challa) warned that the confused consumer could push the market too far.I don't even know where to begin. Now home-buyers are supposed to throw prudence to the winds and jump into the market in the broader interests of the economy, never mind the uncertainty over their paychecks and whether they would be able to afford the astronomical EMIs. Also notice how their caution is characterized as confusion.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Backups
- Get hold of a Maxtor 320 GB external drive.
- Plug it into Linux and find out that the capacity reported is actually 300 GB. I have experienced this before as well -- my Acer laptop's hard drive was touted as 60 GB while the partitioning software reported it as 55 GB. (Update: When it comes to disk sizes, 'giga' means 10 raised to 9, and not 2 raised to 30. Duh.)
- My intention was to use the drive for both the personal and work laptops by dividing it into an NTFS partition and an ext3 partition. To do this you need to add NTFS support to gparted by installing the ntfsprogs package.
- Use gparted to resize the existing NTFS partition and create an ext3 partition from the freed up space.
- Using rsync to back up the data partition in Linux is a breeze -- the whole thing is over in about 15 minutes.
- Now attach the drive to the work laptop and find that the drive is not recognized at all, except to report an unknown device called 'Maxtor Basics'.
- Tear hair out for a half day or so trying to figure this out, including a) upgrading to Windows XP Service Pack 3 and b) running Mepis Live CD on the laptop and confirming that the drive is compatible with the laptop's hardware.
- Fix the problem finally by deleting a file called 'infcache.1' in c:\windows\inf. Now the drive appears in both Windows Explorer and the disk management snapin. Also change the access permissions for usbstor.pnf and usbstor.inf, to be on the safe side.
- Waste about half an hour trying to use the built-in Windows backup utility -- get errors like 'delayed writing failed', etc.
- Download Cobian Backup and complete the job -- the backup process is nowhere near as fast as using rsync in Linux, but it does the job adequately.
- One minor issue still remains; I'm unable to remove the drive in Windows using the 'Safely remove hardware' option -- Windows reports that the device cannot be stopped now and asks me to try later.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Why do I even bother?
Spotted in DC in an article about the rupee (italics mine):
In nominal terms, it has fallen from Rs 39.27 to the US dollar on January 15 to Rs 51.10 to the US dollar by March 3 -- a decline of more than 30% in less than two months.The time it took for the rupee to fall 30% is actually 13 months, since the January 15 refers to 2008, not 2009. It wouldn't have mattered so much if this was from a regular news item (what with reporters facing deadlines and all), but the sentence in question is from the first paragraph of an op-ed piece, where one would assume more care would be taken to ensure accuracy.
Saturday, March 21, 2009
Naked short selling brought down Lehman?
The Deep Capture guys must be feeling vindicated. On the other hand, is this just blame-shifting by the folks at Lehman?
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
How to spot a hidden religious agenda
From How to spot a hidden religious agenda:
Misguided interpretations of quantum physics are a classic hallmark of pseudoscience, usually of the New Age variety, but some religious groups are now appealing to aspects of quantum weirdness to account for free will. Beware: this is nonsense.Yes, you there in the last row, I'm talking to you.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Wild Fire
I have read a couple of Nelson DeMille novels before, and have found them quite readable. I picked one up -- Wild Fire -- after a long gap. I have not made it through Chapter 1 yet, but I have already been assaulted by a combination of cliches, trying-too-hard-to-be-clever quips, an overdose of testosterone and plain old jingoism. Some samples:
Update: Surprisingly, the book turned out to be an entertaining read, the Bollywood style climax notwithstanding.
- "We are now a mostly paperless organization, and I actually miss initialing memos. I had an urge to initial my computer with a grease pencil, but I settled for the electronic equivalent. If I ran this organization, all memos would be on an Etch A Sketch."
- "Also included in our collegial group are people who, like ghosts, don't actually exist, but if they did, they'd be called CIA."
- "Also, this guy has a bad habit of coming back from the dead - he's done it at least once before - and without a positive body identification, I'm not breaking out the champagne."
- "My wife is a beautiful woman, but even if she weren't, I'd still love her. Actually, if she weren't beautiful, I wouldn't have even noticed her, so it's a moot point."
- "The message read [Ed: It's in all caps in the novel -- BTW, somebody please tell the author that normal people don't type in all-caps anymore -- but in the interest of not hurting the eyes too much, I've changed it to normal text]: Let's knock off early, go home, have sex, I'll cook you chili and hot dogs, and make you drinks while you watch TV in your underwear. Actually, it didn't say that. It said: Let's go away for a romantic weekend of wine tasting on the North Fork. I'll book a B&B. Love, Kate."
- "Like most men, I'd rather face the muzzle of an assault rifle than a pissed-off wife."
- "... who I strongly suspect was once romantically involved with my then future wife. This is not why I disliked him - it was why I hated him. I disliked him for professional reasons."
- Never referring to Osama bin Laden without the prefix "scumbag", a derogatory reference to the Middle East ("Sandland"). We get it -- you are a red-blooded American.
- "Not one of my better cases, but it brought me and Kate together, so the next time I see him, I'll thank him for that, before I gut-shoot him and watch him die slowly."
- "This was one of the reasons. we got divorced. The other was that she thought cooking and f**king were two cities in China."
Update: Surprisingly, the book turned out to be an entertaining read, the Bollywood style climax notwithstanding.
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Investors' dilemma
Olga Tellis' columns (by the way, I've always wondered about this: what's a Russian doing, writing finance columns for Deccan Chronicle?) usually make a lot of sense, but I don't agree with this:
She continues:
The more and more I think about the whole investing thing, I can't help but come to these conclusions:
A study of asset class-wise returns between 1998 and October 2008 by Fidelity International shows that equity has out-performed all other asset classes, followed by gold, fixed deposits and lastly, gilt.Tell that to an investor in the Japanese stock market: the Nikkei, after reaching an all-time high of 38,957.44 on December 29, 1989, is currently languishing at 7,376.12. An investor with a time frame of say, 19 years, would be really sore from all the ass-reaming.
But one has to have a long term horizon of seven to 10 years.
She continues:
For an individual, it is difficult to time the market, namely to buy at the lowest price and sell it at the highest.A quick glance at the financial pages shows that there are approximately 57,483 mutual funds to choose from, run by fund managers with varying levels of competence. In what way is this better than choosing from an even larger list of individual company stocks? Also, unless a mutual fund is able to short stocks, I do not understand how it can give positive returns in a bear market; it's not a hedge fund, after all.
One has to know one's risk and reward profile and invest accordingly.
That is why it is better to go through the mutual fund route.
Many mutual funds may be performing badly in the present scenario, but it is not true of all mutual funds.
There are several who are doing well and giving good returns even in this scenario.
The more and more I think about the whole investing thing, I can't help but come to these conclusions:
- Investing your money is not a way to become rich. Your aim should be two-fold: a) ensure that you don't lose your principal and b) beat inflation. A regular saving habit [putting your money in rock solid investments (and no, I don't mean mutual funds or stocks)], coupled with the under-appreciated magic of compound interest, will take you a long way.
- Earn your money by the sweat of your brow, not by clever, get-rich-quick schemes.
Monday, March 09, 2009
Quote of the day
Dude, feed him some moon pies and oxycontin and call him Mini-Me. As bread'n'circuses go, it couldn't be beat.
-- Reddit comment about Republican wunderkind Jonathan Krohn.
-- Reddit comment about Republican wunderkind Jonathan Krohn.
Saturday, March 07, 2009
Off-balance sheet exposure
From Deccan Chronicle:
Among the bank groups, the off-balance sheet exposure of foreign banks was over 28 times of their total liabilities. Private sector banks and public sector banks had off-balance sheet exposures of 251.2 per cent and 61.5 per cent of their total liabilities, respectively.That's right, it's not 28 per cent, but 28 times. Considering that Citigroup is supposed to have a trillion or so dollars in off-balance sheet SIVs, this is not surprising:
The top five banks with the largest off-balance sheet exposures in India were Citibank - Rs 16,44,729 crore; Standard Chartered - Rs 16,25,608 crore; HSBC - Rs 13,22,985 crore; ICICI Bank - Rs 11,51,349 crore and Barclays Bank - Rs 10,44,134 crore.Like parent, like subsidiary. Also note that you-know-who is the only Indian bank in this sorry list.
Spot the odd one out
Three headlines:
Speaking of newspapers, is it just me, or has R K Laxman jumped the shark? The You Said It series cartoons are giving Sudhir Talang and Keshav a good run for their money in the "Which newspaper has the most insipid cartoon" contest. Time for graceful retirement, I think.
- Unruly lawyers started violence, police exceeded limits: Srikrishna -- The Hindu
- Srikrishna slams CJ for soft-pedalling row - SC puts ball in high court -- Deccan Chronicle
- Srikrishna report indicts protesting TN lawyers -- Times of India
Speaking of newspapers, is it just me, or has R K Laxman jumped the shark? The You Said It series cartoons are giving Sudhir Talang and Keshav a good run for their money in the "Which newspaper has the most insipid cartoon" contest. Time for graceful retirement, I think.
Monday, March 02, 2009
IIPM voted best B School in the country
... in the non-IIM category.
And by the way, if you didn't know it already, I have been voted the best batsman in the country in the non-Sachin Tendulkar category for the last three years.
And by the way, if you didn't know it already, I have been voted the best batsman in the country in the non-Sachin Tendulkar category for the last three years.
LeT shuts down after anti-terrorism pledge
The Pakistan-based terrorist group Lashkar-e-Toiba today announced that it was shutting down. This announcement came in the wake of the anti-terrorism pledge taken by the Orissa Chief Minister, Union Minister Mani Shankar Aiyar and a host of religious leaders. Addressing a group of reporters at a hurriedly convened press conference, Mohammed Aftab, the LeT spokesperson, said that this action left his group completely stunned. "We did not see this coming," he said. "We can handle a military raid, air strikes, even cruise missiles, but this is too much. I mean, how can we defend against something as deadly as a..." -- he quickly emptied a glass of water before continuing, "an anti-terrorism pledge"? He went on to add that they were planning to take this up with the International Criminal Court, claiming that a serious violation of their human rights had been committed.
In related news, the president of the Confederation of Indian Industry announced that an anti-recession pledge would be taken by all its members on March 15. This news was greeted by an immediate 230 point spurt in the Sensex. The rally could not be sustained, however, when the traders realized that the American President, Mr Barack Obama, would not be taking the pledge owing to prior commitments on that day.
In related news, the president of the Confederation of Indian Industry announced that an anti-recession pledge would be taken by all its members on March 15. This news was greeted by an immediate 230 point spurt in the Sensex. The rally could not be sustained, however, when the traders realized that the American President, Mr Barack Obama, would not be taking the pledge owing to prior commitments on that day.
Warren Buffet does derivatives?
From Bloomberg, via Mish Shedlock's blog:
Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. posted a fifth-straight profit drop, the longest streak of quarterly declines in at least 17 years, on losses from derivative bets tied to stock markets.And here I was, thinking Warren Buffet was conservative and invested only in things he understood.
...
Berkshire shares have fallen 44 percent in the past year as the value of the firm’s top equity holdings dropped and losses increased on the derivatives.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
KDE 4.2
Well, most of the things I bitched about 4.0 have been fixed in 4.2. All in all, a much better user experience, except that things are not very zippy.
BTW, owing to MEPIS not shipping 4.2 yet, I have switched to Debian Lenny. It needed adding the experimental packages to apt, but no issues in the installation, as was the case when I tried it with MEPIS.
BTW, owing to MEPIS not shipping 4.2 yet, I have switched to Debian Lenny. It needed adding the experimental packages to apt, but no issues in the installation, as was the case when I tried it with MEPIS.
Saturday, February 21, 2009
Definition of the day
Quantitative easing: A word invented by central bankers because 'printing money' smacks too much of Zimbabwe -- John Mauldin
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Inflation, financial markets and fiat money
From a column in the latest issue of Outlook Money:
Don't be surprised if [educational] costs quadruple by the time you need to reach out for the chequebook for your kid's higher studies. This means that, unlike our parents, we can no longer invest in lower-risk, fixed income options since the growth of our investments will be hopelessly outsprinted by inflation.Yeah, nothing like some good old fashioned scaremongering ("Think of the children!") to drive the suckers into the markets so that the insiders can make their killing. On a related note, consider this:
Now comes the tricky part. To catch up with runaway costs, you will perforce need to mount the high-speed but higher-risk horse of growth investments such as equity mutual funds (MFs), unit-linked insurance plans (Ulips) that have a high equity exposure and perhaps some stocks.
Under a commodity standard, people could save for the future by accumulating gold and silver coins. The coins’ value appreciated over time because of their natural increase in purchasing power, as the relatively slow increase in the production of precious metals was outpaced by the much faster increase in the production of other goods and services. Today, only a fool would try to save for the future by piling up dollar bills. Everyone is forced to enter the financial markets, which are risky even for knowledgeable investors, in order to prevent the value of his retirement savings from vanishing before his eyesSomething to think about.
Managing the jargon-mongers
There is an article entitled "Managing the slowdown" in today's Hindu that sort of sets the bar on how high (low?) you can go with just spouting jargon and still end up with a publishable piece. Rather than quoting portions from it, I'll just let the list of buzzwords do the job:
strategic management, effective management practices, effective management of various processes, operational efficiency, evaluation of all processes and systems, efficiency improvement, value-engineering, re-engineering, efficiency improvement parameters, SWOT, group discussions, formation of task forces, schedule for achieving better results, right sizing, managing human capital, upgrading of people's competencies, improve all round efficiency, human capital restructuring needs, exit route strategies, out-placement, talent development, Management Information Systems, Project and Office efficiency, Training Need Analysis, Train The Trainer Programme, feeling of ownership among employees.Man, I wish I could write like that -- I would then leverage a synergistic win-win situation for all the stakeholders just like that -- *snaps fingers*.
It would be funny
...if it weren't so sad:
Asked by The Sun newspaper what (the 13-year-old father) would do financially to support his "family", the baby-faced father looked flummoxed and asked, "What's financially?"Screw it, it is funny, bad karma notwithstanding.
Sunday, February 08, 2009
Huh?
From an article about Ukraine's financial troubles:
Kiev Mayor Leonid Chernovetsky — a highly visible politician — had difficulty answering even the most basic questions about the capital's financial problems at a recent news conference. Asked about shortages of gas to schools, city doctors who hadn't been paid for months and a threatened strike by local bus drivers, Chernovetsky responded with mumbles and stream-of-consciousness riffs about the local zoo and his affection for elephants, the need for more trees and flowers in the city, his propensity to dry off naked on a balcony after showering and the importance of the Bible.
Saturday, February 07, 2009
The end of the two-state solution
This article talks about how difficult it is to implement a two-state solution. What with Qaddafi's proposal for a one-state solution finding mindshare, the global revulsion at the Gaza war crimes and calls for boycott, it looks like the Israelis have been hoisted with their own petard -- all their efforts to squeeze the Palestinians into smaller and smaller swathes of land and make a Palestinian state unviable seem to be in the process of backfiring spectacularly, with the end result being a single democratic, post-apartheid state with a Palestinian majority. Watch out for a quick scramble to accept the 1967 borders.
Thursday, February 05, 2009
Mahesh 'ditches' Mirza, takes Bopanna to movie
From DC:
For God's sake, grow up, woman.
Sania wanted to watch the much acclaimed film, directed by Danny Boyle, but instead of taking her along, Bhupathi and Bopanna went ahead and saw the movie. "Mahesh and Rohan ditched me and went to watch Slumdog Millionaire," Sania said on Tuesday.She went on to add, "And they came back and had ice cream cones in their hands and I was very upset that they had ice cream without me and I got angry and I went to my mommy and told her 'Mommy, Mahesh and Rohan went to the movies without me and had ice cream cones. They are bad boys and I don't want to be friends with them', and my mommy said, 'Don't worry honey, you don't need them, go to bed like a good girl and mommy will find you much better friends tomorrow' and that made me happy and I was smiling and I got into bed and fell asleep and dreamt of hundreds of tennis balls with Mahesh's and Rohan's faces drawn on them and I was hitting them very hard with my tennis racket and I felt even happier".
For God's sake, grow up, woman.
Wednesday, February 04, 2009
"Sweet Rascal" my ass
Today a biker overtook me dangerously on my way to work. Common occurrence, given the below-average intelligence of these Neanderthals, but one thing was different this time: the sticker on the rear of his bike that said "Sweet Rascal". Sweet Rascal? Try "F***ing Idiot".
That reminds me of a car that did more or less the same thing to me a couple of months back. This guy had a big sticker that said "Jesus Christ is the only way to heaven". Not quite, buddy. There is another way, too, and it looks like you've a head start, if you know what I mean.
That reminds me of a car that did more or less the same thing to me a couple of months back. This guy had a big sticker that said "Jesus Christ is the only way to heaven". Not quite, buddy. There is another way, too, and it looks like you've a head start, if you know what I mean.
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
What revival?
From The Hindu - Exports show signs of revival:
Halting the sharp fall for the past two months and giving indications of a revival, exports declined by a meagre 1.1 per cent in December 2008 over the same month last year showing a negative growth for the past three months but with signs of withstanding the worsening global economic crisis.Not so fast:
India's exports in January are expected to plummet by more than a fifth as the global slowdown slashes demand for Indian goods, and the trade minister said further government aid for ailing firms may follow.
"We expect exports in January to be down 22 percent in dollar terms," Commerce Secretary G.K. Pillai said, indicating that overseas sales could decline to $11.5 billion from $14.7 billion a year ago.
Monday, February 02, 2009
Spot the hypocrisy
"Judges must make their assets public" -- Jayanthi Natarajan, Congress MP and AICC spokesperson.
In other news, "Ministers' assets not under RTI":
In other news, "Ministers' assets not under RTI":
The PMO has decided to keep the assets of ministers and their relatives under wraps saying (this) information is exempted from the RTI act.
Vitamin C can help beat cancers
Not a very catchy story, is it? Let's spice it up a bit -- "Munch on: Potato chips can help beat cancers":
The mouth-watering chips have long been labelled as a "junk food". Yet, experts have claimed that gorging on a deep-fried potato diet can help people in beating certain cancers.Why do I get the feeling that this news item has an ulterior motive of persuading people to eat more of a) potatoes or b) junk food? The conspiracy theorist in me leans towards (b) -- potatoes, after all, are proven to be a good source of nutrition (including vitamin C), and there are other, much healthier, sources for vitamin C as well.
According to them, chips are rich in vitamin C, which tackles dangerous free radicals associated with cancer growth, and those suffering with the disease can even shrink the size of their tumours by eating wafers, the Daily Star reported.
Sunday, February 01, 2009
Slumdog Millionaire
Note: Please refer to this for more on the evaluation parameters.
Question #1: The ability of the movie to hold your attention is:
Question #2: The quality of stunts/effects/action sequences is:
How can there be two correct answers to a Who wants to be a millionaire contest question, you ask. Bite me.
Question #3: How would you rate the crispness of the dialog?
Question #4: What about the clicheness index?
Question #5: How would you rate the originality of the plot?
Question #6: Believability of the plot:
Question #7: Quality of the cast and their acting:
If you banish the thought that you have to like the movie -- it's won ten Oscar nominations, A R Rahman put together the music, so you better leave the country if you don't like it, you dirty traitor, and so on -- Slumdog Millionaire is a very average movie. The choice of English for the dialog reminded (I should say brought bad memories, rather) of Sins, another movie I remember for all the wrong reasons.
Except for the younger versions of Salim, Jamal and Latika, everybody else turns in pretty crappy performances. Irfan Khan's talents are criminally underutilized, and as for Anil Kapoor, can't really blame anybody -- there's not much talent to utilize, is there? He could have gone easy on all the sneering, though.
The climax reminded me of The Truman Show, with everybody glued to their television sets, watching the fortunes of their hero ebb and flow, but here the suspense and drama are inherited (stolen?) from the Millionaire contest format than anything else.
BTW, the best scene in the movie is the Bollywood dance in VT right before they start rolling the credits. That says a lot.
Question #1: The ability of the movie to hold your attention is:
| A. Huh, you were saying? C. So so | B. Very good D. Let's go out for pizza |
Question #2: The quality of stunts/effects/action sequences is:
| A. Excellent C. So so | B. Very good D. Not really applicable |
Question #3: How would you rate the crispness of the dialog?
| A. So crispy I thought it was the popcorn C. So so | B. Very good D.Stilted and soggy like a wet samosa |
Question #4: What about the clicheness index?
| A. Completely refreshing and original C.It's a Bollywood movie. Need I say more? | B. Very good D. Danny Boyle directed this? Seriously? |
Question #5: How would you rate the originality of the plot?
| A. Very highly C.It's a Bollywood movie. Need I say more? | B. Quite original D. Danny Boyle directed this? Seriously? |
Question #6: Believability of the plot:
| A. Same thing happened to me a while ago C. It's a Bollywood movie. Need I say more? | B. Heck, I know Jamal D. CowboyNeal |
Question #7: Quality of the cast and their acting:
| A. I am uplifted C. It's a Bollywood movie. Need I say more? | B. I've seen better D. Abysmal |
If you banish the thought that you have to like the movie -- it's won ten Oscar nominations, A R Rahman put together the music, so you better leave the country if you don't like it, you dirty traitor, and so on -- Slumdog Millionaire is a very average movie. The choice of English for the dialog reminded (I should say brought bad memories, rather) of Sins, another movie I remember for all the wrong reasons.
Except for the younger versions of Salim, Jamal and Latika, everybody else turns in pretty crappy performances. Irfan Khan's talents are criminally underutilized, and as for Anil Kapoor, can't really blame anybody -- there's not much talent to utilize, is there? He could have gone easy on all the sneering, though.
The climax reminded me of The Truman Show, with everybody glued to their television sets, watching the fortunes of their hero ebb and flow, but here the suspense and drama are inherited (stolen?) from the Millionaire contest format than anything else.
BTW, the best scene in the movie is the Bollywood dance in VT right before they start rolling the credits. That says a lot.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
It's all about the money (well, for most of us)
From a post by an ex-Google employee:
In one TGIF in Kirkland, an employee informed Eric Schmidt that Microsoft’s benefits package was richer. He announced himself genuinely surprised, which genuinely surprised me. Schmidt, in the presence of witnesses, promised to bring the benefits to a par. He consulted HR, and HR informed him that it’d cost Google 22 million a year to do that. So he abandoned the promise and fell back on his tired, familiar standby (”People don’t work at Google for the money. They work at Google because they want to change the world!”). A statement that always seemed to me a little Louis XIV coming from a billionaire.Amen to that. I too have heard about similar stories of senior management folks who, having made their fortunes in stock options, feign incredulity and exclaim, "Don't tell me you are in it for the money!", when the sorry fact is that if the next month's paycheck isn't in, it's a question of which bill can you postpone payment for.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Saturday, January 10, 2009
FUD statement of the day
"We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet."
-- Anne H. Milley, director of technology product marketing at SAS
That's right, all free software is baaad.
-- Anne H. Milley, director of technology product marketing at SAS
That's right, all free software is baaad.
Gaza
Why does Hamas still persist with not recognizing the state of Israel and calling for its destruction, thereby providing a fig leaf to Israel to carry out its genocide? Hamas' hatred may be justified, but pragmatism dictates that they do what is best for their people. Of course, it's a moot point that Israel would come to reason and start conforming to internationally accepted standards of behaviour once Hamas does this.
Deccan Chronicle 1 - 0 Hindu
Headline in The Hindu:
Deccan Chronicle version:
Order allowing plea challenging appointment of Ananth stayedHead hurts, trying to figure out whether this is good news for the director or not.
Deccan Chronicle version:
HC reprieve for IIT-M directorThanks, got it.
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Lawyers, MBAs and Engineers
From an interview with the president of the China Investment Corporation in The Atlantic:
The best and brightest minds go to lawyering, go to M.B.A.s. And that affects our country, too! Many of the brightest youngsters come to me and say, “Okay, I want to go to the U.S. and get into business school, or law school.” I say, “Why? Why not science and engineering?” They say, “Look at some of my primary-school classmates. Their IQ is half of mine, but they’re in finance and now they’re making all this money.”Nothing new in this, except that the part in italics is a near-verbatim quote of what someone said to me yesterday, after meeting one such MBA.
Friday, December 19, 2008
Well
...now the Videocon offer doesn't sound so bad, does it?
With the handset unit continuing to bleed cash, Motorola was planning to spin the division off into a separate company and focus on its remaining two businesses, which focus on home entertainment and emergency-response communications. Those plans have been scrapped for now given the lack of interest by investors.
Sunday, December 14, 2008
It's All Very Well
... doing macho stuff like sinking pirate mother ships and capturing pirates, but it would also be nice if the Indian Navy could turn their attention to protecting the Indian coastline once in a while.
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Pop Quiz
What do these words and phrases have in common:
Option B: They are all from V R Krishna Iyer's article in yesterday's Hindu.
There is a lot of sense in what the retired judge has to say, but this gets buried (should I say 'interred') in the pompous verbiage. To be fair, I get a sort of perverse pleasure watching these words jostle for space before making an uneasy peace with their cohabitants whom they would rather die than share a sentence with normally -- it's almost like reading bad poetry -- but the message gets lost. Some sample sentences:
puissant, rascally, indolence, diabolical, instrumentality, Kilkenny cat functionalism, nocent, pachydermicOption A: They were all taken from the Reading Comprehension section of the most recent edition of the GRE.
Option B: They are all from V R Krishna Iyer's article in yesterday's Hindu.
There is a lot of sense in what the retired judge has to say, but this gets buried (should I say 'interred') in the pompous verbiage. To be fair, I get a sort of perverse pleasure watching these words jostle for space before making an uneasy peace with their cohabitants whom they would rather die than share a sentence with normally -- it's almost like reading bad poetry -- but the message gets lost. Some sample sentences:
Are our expensive defence systems so goofy and gullible that hostiles in guile, with brute objectives, can reach a busy city, march inside a seven-star hotel and indulge in diabolical destruction with vindictive terrorism?I wanted to add a few more examples, but for some reason, I seem to have developed a headache all of a sudden.
Even where Ministers and bureaucrats wine and dine, nocent neglect is writ large
The perspective of the executive at the State and Central levels is bureaucratic and pachydermic; pomp and power of office is the focus.
Somebody please tell her
... that no, it's not OK for her to start prescribing medicine:
"When I started to play tennis, I wanted to be a doctor. I had to choose between tennis and being a doctor and I chose tennis. Now, thanks to MGR University, both my dreams have come true," said tennis star Dr Sania Mirza, HDFTBU(Alright, I added the prefix and degree to her name. Readers who figure out what HDFTBU stands for will win an honorary doctorate from... never mind)
Saturday, November 29, 2008
... And They Come Out of the Woodwork
Some false flag conspiracy talking points about the Mumbai attacks that are doing the rounds:
- Hemant Karkare was killed because he was close to exposing the truth about the involvement of the establishment in the Malegaon blast.
- One of the pictures of the terrorists shows him wearing a red thread on his right arm, so the whole thing is a right wing Hindu conspiracy.
- Some of the terrorists were seen ordering liquor (gasp!), so again it's an indication that it's a right wing Hindu conspiracy.
- All the Jewish/Israeli hostages at Nariman House escaped (factually incorrect).
- To top it all: India had a hand in 9/11
- Update: The hits keep coming: India, with its large foreign exchange reserves, is pressuring the United States into doing its bidding (whatever that is)
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Jargon, Jargon Everywhere
Fund Manager Speak:
The macro headwinds for equities are strong with the Reserve Bank of India, in their first quarter review of the annual monetary policy for 2008-09, lowering the growth forecast for the financial year 2008-09 by half a percentage point from 8.5% to 8%.Translation:
Bad time for equities -- RBI has forecast that this year's growth will be 8% and not 8.5% as previously thought [*].Fund Manager Speak:
The investment objective of the scheme is to generate capital appreciation from a diversified portfolio of equity and equity related securities.Translation:
This scheme hopes to make money by buying shares low and selling them high; we are also not putting all our eggs in one basket.[*] Note the use of the word 'strong' in a negative context; one can almost be mistaken into thinking that some good news is being delivered.
Joel on Friedman
Probably the most succinct, yet devastating critique of Thomas Friedman I've seen, Matt Taibbi notwithstanding:
... Thomas Friedman, who, it seems, cannot go a whole week without inventing a new fruit-based metaphor explaining everything about the entire modern world, all based on some random gibberish he misunderstood from a taxi driver in Kuala Lumpur
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Steps to Build and Run SUIF in Linux
- Install these packages:
* bison
* flex
* graphviz
* gcc-2.95
* tcl8.4
* tcl8.4-dev
* tk8.4
* tk-8.4-dev - Extract the contents of basesuif-2.2.0-4.tar.gz to a directory of your choice
- export NCIHOME=<above directory>
- cd $NCIHOME
- /bin/sh ./install --with-CC=/usr/bin/gcc-2.95 --with-CXX=/usr/bin/g++-2.95 \
--with-CXXLINK=/usr/bin/g++-2.95 --with-TCL_INCLDIRS=-I/usr/include/tcl8.4 \
--with-TCL_LIBDIRS=-ltcl8.4 - make setup
- make
- . nci_setup.sh
- make test
- Extract the .tar.gz file to $NCIHOME
- Edit each package's makefile and:
* Change occurrences of '-ltcl8.0' and '-ltk8.0' to '-ltcl8.4' and '-ltk8.4' respectively.
* Add -DUSE_NON_CONST to the CXXFLAGS environment variable - navigate to the package's directory and type 'make'
Sunday, November 09, 2008
The Global Financial Crisis
Some random thoughts on the global financial crisis:
- People keep calling it a liquidity problem, while it's actually a solvency problem. But in a world of fractional reserve banking and insane leveraging, there's not that much difference between the two, I guess.
- Fractional reserve banking may be the root cause of all the evils by causing unchecked expansion of credit and money supply, but would a world where all the currencies are backed by gold be capable of sustaining the prosperity of everybody (or even lifting more people out of poverty), when considering the rapid rise in the world population in the last hundred or so years?
- I was impressed enough with the tenets of Austrian economics -- due in no small measure to reading Mike Shedlock's blog -- to go out and buy Economics in One Lesson. While the arguments against government meddling for short term gains are impeccable in theory, one wonders whether it is possible to apply the theory to the real world without causing misery to large segments of the population. Consider this argument against minimum wages:
When such consequences are pointed out, there are those who reply: "Very well; if it is true that the X industry cannot exist except by paying starvation wages, then it will be just as well if the minimum wage puts it out of existence altogether." But this brave pronouncement overlooks the realities. It overlooks, first of all, that consumers will suffer the loss of this product. It forgets, in the second place, that it is merely condemning the people who worked in that industry to unemployment. And it ignores, finally, that bad as were the wages paid in the X industry, they were the best among all the alternatives that seemed open to the workers in that industry; otherwise the workers would have gone into another. If, therefore, the X industry is driven out of existence by a minimum wage law, then the workers previously employed in that industry would be forced to turn to alternative courses that seemed less attractive to them in the first place.
In reality, how easy is it for someone to change their career midway through? Unless the assumption is that since it's a minimum wage job we are talking about, one does not need significant retraining for a new career. Also, people sometimes don't want to relocate in favour of a higher paying job, and are forced to put up with lower wages. - One keeps reading about the next round of CDS auctions being the ticking bomb that is going to blow us all sky high, but these D-days seem to come and go without much ado.
Drowning in Oil
From Caroline Baum:
All speculative bubbles have a kernel of truth behind them to justify their existence. This time around it was China and India. These emerging Asian giants were gobbling up all the commodities the world could produce to fuel their rapid industrialization.That sure rings a bell.
It wasn't that the story was untrue; it was old. Growing global demand probably was the reason for the gradual rise in oil prices from $20 a barrel to $40 earlier in the decade, and even to $60 by mid-2005.
It was the moon shot to $147 that took on a life, and a litany, of its own. Emerging nations didn't start gobbling up crude, coal and copper all of a sudden in the middle of 2007.
Saturday, October 04, 2008
Near-Death Experiences
There's an article about research into 'out-of-body' experiences in yesterday's Hindu (note: the online edition is a truncated version of the print article). I have been fascinated with NDE for quite some time, and so I was looking forward to knowing whether there is any conclusive evidence one way or the other. Sure enough, there is mention of an objective method to collect evidence (emphasis mine):
Methinks there's no conclusive evidence; or, it's a "buy my book to find out all about it" ploy. Also, what the heck is an academic book? Has it been peer-reviewed like an academic paper?
I wanted to investigate if these experiences could be attributed to the drugs that we gave the patients, to abnormal levels of oxygen or carbon dioxide in the blood and was there a way of verifying the out-of-body component? So I hid symbols on top of cardiac monitors at each patient's bedside which could only be viewed from an out of body perspective.That sounds promising; reading on:
In June 2008 my book, an academic monograph, "The Near-Death Experiences of Hospitalized Intensive Care Patients: A Five Year Clinical Study" was published by The Edwin Mellen Press. The reason that I chose to publish an academic book is because I believe these experiences need to be taken seriously.The article then goes into the details of the study, its purported benefits, and so on, but there is no mention of whether any evidence supporting these experiences was found.
Methinks there's no conclusive evidence; or, it's a "buy my book to find out all about it" ploy. Also, what the heck is an academic book? Has it been peer-reviewed like an academic paper?
Friday, September 19, 2008
Predatory Lending
Just when the whole world is waking up to the fact that too much of leverage is a bad thing, there's an ad in today's Hindu for home loans with a 3% down payment. The lender is none other than ICICI Bank, who is also in the news today for the wrong reasons:
Mr. Chidambaram pointed out that the country’s public sector banks, in which the government holds the majority shareholding, did not have any “undue exposure” and whatever they had were in accordance with the Reserve Bank of India guidelines. ICICI Bank, however, did have some exposure and it had made the necessary disclosures.No surprises there.
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