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:

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.

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

"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.

Thank you

Someone finally calls out on this pretentiousness:


This goes not just for tweeting twats, but also for blog commenters.

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.

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.

Gee, who would've thunk that?

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.

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).

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:

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].

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.

Nice dodge.

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.

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.

Pop Quiz

Which of these two news items is from The Onion?

*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.

Harish Khare appointed PM's media advisor

Looks like all the years of slanted op-eds supporting the Congress party have finally paid off.

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):

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.

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.

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."

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.

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:

1. Media organizations were prohibited from conducting exit polls.


2. 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.


3. There is no verifiable paper audit trail that independently proves that my vote was registered for the candidate of my choice.


4. 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?


5. There is a huge disconnect between then opinion polls and the actual results.