Musings of a Mumbai bloke

Hirak talks about this new search engine: A9.com

One of the often extended criticisms for political opinion polls is that people who do not matter quiet often form the sample group. This criticism is largely right because who knows how many people who take 10 seconds to give their choice or opinion on a candidate actually take the trouble to go and vote on election day. If the collective public opinion is not right, neither is an expert opinion often on the mark. James Surowiecki in his book Wisdom of the crowds very nicely explains how sometimes the "crowd" is more right than any expert opinion or public poll.

To explain this theory that crowds can be very 'wise' provided this certain conditions are met. In his book he gives an example of the famous show "Who wants to be a millionaire" in which the audience came up with the right answer 91% of the time. In contrast the phone a friend where the contestant called his chosen 'expert' were right only 65% of the time . He goes onto explain that, This was so because it fullfilled the condition that the members of the group were not talking to each other or working on a problem together. They were making individual guesses, which were aggregated and then averaged.

Another example of collective wisdom is that of the Iowa Electronic Market where the political candidates are traded as stock and people actually "buy" shares with real money.
Check out the graph on this link to find out what is the current status of the presidential race .Iowa Electronic Market

Another recent example:
Long before CBS and Dan Rather came forth with their apology about the fraudulent documents about Bush's Vietnam era records, the "Blogosphere" was filled with this opinion-- Wisdom of the Crowds !!!!

If you have iTunes downloaded on your computer and you click on this link

your iTunes application will automatically open behind this browser window and take you to the best instrumental music album i have ever heard. check it out !!!

funny pic huh ??

Looks like someone at the Harvard university is having fun at our W's expense. Visit this link and check out the image on the upper right corner. A monkey's face slowly morphs into that of our president. :)link While you are there you might want to check out the moral sense test. Its's pretty interesting that someone had the nerve to play this subtle joke on an official harvard university page. :)

come tax time 2005 if you are going to avail sevices of companies like HR&Block it might very well happen that the accountant who works on your return is in Banglore !!! Thomas L Friedman, author of Lexus and Olive Tree is working on his new book called World is Flat. Acclaimed as an authority on Globalization, Friedman writes for the NY Times. Begining of this year Friedman visited India to report, as he put it, "from the other side of outsourcing". Friedman, in his column in NY Times writes about accountant Mr. Rao in Banglore:

Mr. Rao, whose company, MphasiS, has a team of Indian accountants able to do outsourced accounting work from across the U.S. All the necessary tax data is scanned by U.S. firms into a database that can be viewed from India. Then an Indian accountant, trained in U.S. tax practices, fills in all the basics.
"This is happening as we speak — we are doing several thousand returns," said Mr. Rao. American C.P.A.'s don't even need to be in their offices. They can be on a beach, said Mr. Rao, "and say, `Jerry, you are particularly good at doing New York returns, so you do Tom's returns." He adds, "We have taken the grunt work" so U.S. accountants can focus on customer service and thinking creatively about client needs.
Mr. Rao's ability to service U.S. accounts this way is at the core of a business revolution that has happened over the past few years. I confess: I missed this revolution. I was totally focused on 9/11 and Iraq. But having now spent 10 days in Bangalore, India's Silicon Valley, I realize that while I was sleeping, the world entered the third great era of globalization.

Friedman in this article titled Small and Smaller, explains that we are into Globalization 3.0 and the way he sumed up the article got me excited to sit up and pen this blog after a long overdue blog post.

" So now I wonder: when they write the history of the world 20 years from now, and they come to this chapter — Sept. 11, 2001, to March 2004 — what will they say was most important? The attack on the World Trade Center and the Iraq war? Or, as Mr. Rao suggests, the convergence of PC's, telecom and work-flow software into a tipping point that allowed India to become part of the global supply chain for services the way China had become for manufacturing — creating an explosion of wealth in the middle classes of the world's two biggest nations, India and China, and giving both nations a huge new stake in the success of globalization. I wonder? "