Musings of a Mumbai bloke

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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? "

This August 4th I reached the magical age of 32 years. Some random thoughts on reaching this "old" age :

--32 is a magical number for a dentist. It has a "now the set is complete" ring to it

--its about time that I become adult enough such that I can discipline myself to write this blog on a regular basis.

I wish there was a ticker symbol for this Clinton name with listing on NYSE. I would have bought this stock. "Internet chatter" leads me to believe... come july, the democratic convention we will see this name rise to prominence. Will she take the number 2 spot and run as a runnning mate with one of the nominees or will she just wait in the wings till 2008 and then throw herself into the race for the whitehouse? Time will tell.

One thing is for sure this name is going to become a hot topic for talk shows, magazines and blogs for months and years(?) to come. !

Its a wecome sign that diplomatic talks between India and Pakistan have resumed.There is news that govt. has begunl dialogue with the political groups in kashmir too. Very encouraging news.
Two questions:
This being the election year, is this just another gimmick?
OR
Is it that with the "war against terrorism" being waged in Iraq and Afghannistan, there is not much money flowing to the militants in Pakistan and the Kashmir Valley?

Any comments?

Watched some good hindi movies lately. "jahnkar beats", "munnabhai MBBS" and "Mr.&Mrs. Iyer". As one of my friends mentioned looks like suddenly the movie directors have graduated to a whole different level. they are moving away from cliched story lines, showing that panche in handling the movie etc.

i want to say this has a lot to do with the last DVD that you and me rented from the neighbourhood indian grocery store. what are the chances that, that rented DVD was a pirated copy 1 in 10? 5 years back the VHS piracy was so rampant that i doubt if i ever saw even 1% original VHS. i think with the advent of this new trend there is more chance that the revenues trickle down to the right people, companies, directors etc.

Besides the over seas audience has become an important market for any movie release. This explains the trend in movies like "american chai, green card fever "

I am very encouraged with the trend. i hope we see more movies like Mr&Mrs. Iyer. this leads me to wonder would we have a paid site for hindi music downloads ever?? like the itunes music store? wishful thinking .....!!!!

This story on NPR was perhaps the most intriguing story on science i have heard on radio in the past few months:

Companies are spending millions trying to get inside consumers' minds -- literally -- through the emerging field of neuromarketing. They're using MRI scanners to see how human brains respond to new products and advertising. NPR's Jon Hamilton reports.

In this article in NY times writer Norimitsu Onishi describes how the Japanese are very honest and scrupulous about turning in found articles:

"....lost-and-found centers exist all over Japan,......in 2002 people found and brought to the Tokyo center $23 million in cash, 72 percent of which was returned to the owners, ......."

guess which article has the highest return rate: Cellphones.-75%

What has sustained this honest trait over hundreds of years? Just a quirk? or is it due to the strength of the 'eastern culture' ??? or is it something else?

Since the past 9 months A team of US investigators have been making a last ditch effort to unearth evidence for the much touted Weapons of Mass destruction program in Iraq. Today Washington Post carried an article

"Iraq's Arsenal Was Only on Paper Since Gulf War, Nonconventional Weapons Never Got Past the Planning Stage "by By Barton Gellman
He writes, " investigators have found no support for the two main fears expressed in London and Washington before the war: that Iraq had a hidden arsenal of old weapons and built advanced programs for new ones.......they have discovered no work on former germ-warfare agents such as anthrax bacteria, and no work on a new designer pathogen.... The investigators assess that Iraq did not, as charged in London and Washington, resume production of its most lethal nerve agent, VX, or learn to make it last longer in storage. And they have found the former nuclear weapons program, described as a "grave and gathering danger" by President Bush and a "mortal threat" by Vice President Cheney, in much the same shattered state left by U.N. inspectors in the 1990s."Washington Post article

None of this comes as a surprise though. what surprises me the most is how this news item gets burried under all the other media driven stories.More than 480 soldiers have lost their lives and more than 9000 injured/sick had to be evacuated from Iraq according to this story on NPR The NPR story goes to describe how the reporter had a difficult time with the US military which would not give him an accurate report about injured soldiers. Another NPR story described how the military IS NOT keeping a record of number of civillian deaths. if about ten thousand of US military have been either killed or injured can we imagine the scale of lost iraqi lives?



What a shameful loss!!!

I guess groups of people protesting against the incumbent president is a phenomenon as old as democracy itself. In this age when movie making is becoming as simple as"shoot, edit,burn" here is an innovative approach.

MoveOn.org:
"For the last three years, President Bush's policies have ransacked the environment, put our national security at risk, damaged our economy, and redistributed wealth from the middle class to the very wealthiest Americans. Yet thanks to a complacent media, the President has managed to hide behind a carefully constructed "compassionate" image. As the 2004 election nears, it's crucial that voters understand what President Bush's policies really mean for our country. And to do that, we need creative new ads that clearly show what's at stake.
That’s why we decided to launch Bush in 30 Seconds, an ad contest that’s intended to bring new talent and new messages into the world of mainstream political advertising. We're looking for the ad that best explains what this President and his policies are really about -- in only 30 seconds. "


15 ads that made the final list

Dec 16th 2003. in the Marketplace section of the Wall Street Journal there are two headlines with news concerning India.

The first one:

Indian Techs Step Up Rivalry With the West

It talks about companies like Infosys and Wipro are now hiring away 'Rainmakers' or veteran consultants from U.S., European Competitors To Help Bring In Bigger Contracts. These high profile consultants hired for salaries as high as $330,000 help the indian companies to win contracts valued at $100 million each. The north American and west european markets for computer services are valued at about $422 billion.



Second story

Indian Immigrants Return Home Where Software Jobs Await Them

Scott Thrum writes, "Gaurav Maheshwari an was living the dream of a generation of Indian software engineers. The 30-year-old software programmer was earning more than $100,000 a year at a Silicon Valley start-up, living in a luxury San Jose, Calif., apartment complex with a swimming pool, and driving a Nissan Maxima with a souped-up sound system.
Then, Mr. Maheshwari learned that his employer, Lumenare Networks Inc., was moving all of its programming jobs to India to reduce costs. Uncertain of his U.S. prospects amid the tech slump, and with strong family ties tugging him home, Mr. Maheshwari volunteered to go.

Now, he manages 11 of Lumenare's 30 software engineers near Delhi, for the equivalent of $21,000 a year, about one-fifth his old salary. He lives with his wife, their newborn daughter and his parents in a three-bedroom, three-bathroom apartment in a gated complex. The $178-a-month unit building has a washing machine, covered parking and three balconies.

Mr. Maheshwari now drives a smaller Maruti Zen sedan with "just a simple cassette player." But he's also been struck by how much more modern India appears. When he left, ATM machines were a rarity. Now, they're on every corner, along with improved roads, fancier shopping centers and more diverse restaurants. Mr. Maheshwari figures his standard of living is comparable to what he had in Silicon Valley. In the long run, he figures he won't save as much or own as nice a house, but he's happy to be closer to family and friends."



It was interesting to read to different aspects of indian software industry on the same page on the same day. Will Infosys and Wipro be able to whip up success on the Western Turf like the Reliance and Nirma brand once did on the Indian Soil? Will the hundreds of Gaurav Maheshwaris returning back to india herald a era of "reverse brain drain" in india?

i sure hope so !!

# posted by vivek @ Saturday, January 03, 2004