Viswanathan K's Thoughts

I remember this part in a Frederick Forsyth novel ( The Fourth Protocol ) where the Brits had a lady whose job was to look at photos of people and being able to map them to names in government databases (her job was to spot spies from the Soviet bloc). What struck me was that face recognition back then could only be done by humans. Fast forward to today and software does it very well too. I had heard of Face.com that created this app you could install on your smartphone. The app could link to your Facebook account, scan photos of all your friends on Facebook and then start automatically identifying and tagging them in photos you took subsequently. Of course, this was an app you had to install on your phone, so not everyone used it. And then Facebook bought Face.com, and decided to make Face.com scan all images on its databases and start tagging people automatically in any photo loaded onto Facebook. This meant that the facial recognition app had moved from acting only on photos tak

And now it's the coal scam. Expect the same outcome as the 2G scam: denial of any wrongdoing, no convictions, a new auction, endless delays. In other words, nothing will change. But there is one difference about this scam: it can be laid directly at the doorstep of that “honest” person in the UPA, Manmohan Singh. Because he was in charge of the coal department for years together, including the period when these coal block allocations were made. This either proves politics corrupts everyone, or that Manmohan was never honest to begin with or that he doesn't even have the power to run even a single ministry, let alone the country. And yet, he shamelessly insists on hanging on as the “honest” face of Sonia’s band of thieves. Despite all these scams, will the UPA come back to power in the next election? Possibly, yes. Because India's electorate is “secular”. So the most corrupt politician is preferable to the communal administrator, even if the latter is honest. Sad. And al

After Ecuador decided to grant asylum to Julian Assange in their embassy in the UK, the Brits announced that all options were on the table: including storming the embassy to take Assange by force. Really, UK? Isn’t their embassy supposed to be territory of Ecuador by international law? Or does sovereignty have no meaning for the empire on which the sun was never supposed to set? Talking of which, did you think Ecuador did that to piss off the West? No, that wasn’t the only reason. They’ve done the same with Belarus in the past: in 2008, Ecuador granted refugee status to a Belarusian army captain, Barankov. Who then started a blog criticizing Belarus’s authoritarian ruler, Alexander Lukashenko, over corruption and other crimes. So is Ecuador the new America, the new “give me your persecuted” land? Not so fast. After a recent visit by Lukashenko to Ecuador, the Ecuadorians have started a court case to decide whether to extradite Barankov to Belarus! If Belarus is here, can Russia be

Yesterday I read an article about something called the “nocebo”. A nocebo is the other side of the more well-known placebo. While the placebo refers to the dummy “medicine” that has a curative impact because the patient was told it was the real thing, the nocebo refers to the side-effects caused by the dummy “medicine” because the patient was told that the real thing sometimes caused those side-effects! Talking of such self-fulfilling prophecies, I didn’t know that the term “self-fulfilling prophecy” was coined by an economist in the 1940’s! The term was used to describe the scenario where people feel that the economic scenario is bad and hence cut down on non-essential spending which in turn leads to an actual economic slowdown. And talking of economists, I’ve always wondered why those guys never seem to be able predict an actual recession, let alone a depression. Robert Shiller feels the answer isn’t that economists are dumb. Nor is his answer that the world is too complicated to

Most of us do get fooled at times, mostly by friends during pranks or sometimes by conmen. I used to think that the only time anyone wants to be fooled is when going to see magic tricks: after all, you watch those tricks knowing you are going to be fooled. So I was surprised to learn about this incident in 1869 where people went in to see a hoax while knowing that it was a hoax! A factory owner, George Hull, in the US had a giant’s body created to prove how easy it is fool people. He had his cousin, William Newell, bury the body at Cardiff (in the US, not Wales) who then asked some workmen to dig at that exact spot for a well. No surprise then that the workers “found” the giant’s body. Newell set up a tent, put the Cardiff Giant there and charged entry fees to people who wanted to see it. When the crowds swelled out of control, Newell sold the giant to a group of businessmen. At which point, a group of archaeologists declared the giant to be a fake. This is where Stage 1 of the wei

Remember those terms from statistics classes back at school? Like mean, mode, median and other terms which all looked similar, but apparently were not the same? And how none of them, apart from average, ever seemed to get used anywhere in real life? Well, that was my experience anyway. And so I was amused to see a chart (well OK, bar-graph, since we are reliving statistics terms) that used the term “median”. As most of us don’t know, the median is the number above which half the entries lie (and hence, below which the other half lies). The chart confirms what most of us knew already: India is a young country governed by people on their deathbeds. What’s new info is that so are most other countries, though the age gap between the rulers and the ruled isn’t as much in the others.

Everyone knows the story of the boy who cried wolf. So does that mean that the poor sheep is doomed to be served as dinner to the big, bad wolf? Not necessarily, because it's technology to the rescue! So what’s that technology? It’s a combination of a heart rate monitor with good old SMS! Here's how it would work: the sheppard would tie the heat rate monitor to a (shaved) part of the sheep close to its heart. When the wolf attacks, the heart rate of the sheep would shoot up, which in turn would trigger an SMS to the sleeping sheppard, who would presumably come in with his gun blazing! Whatever will they think of next?

The dramatic, sensational version of the coverage of the blackout that hit India a few days back said that over 680 million were affected by the blackout! Wow! That’s like 1 in 10 people on the planet. Newspapers splashed photos of stranded commuters of the Delhi Metro, there were reports of electric trains stopping in tunnels…you get the idea. The 680 million number sounded believable. Until I read this very informative analysis in the Wall Street Journal of how many were really impacted by the blackout. WSJ started off with the fact that only two-thirds of households in India have electricity to begin with. In northern parts of India, that fraction is, as expected, lesser than the national average. Like Bihar. Whatever Nitish Kumar may have done, only 16.4% of households in that state have electricity. Continuing in this manner through all the impacted states, the calculations showed that the number of people impacted came to 323 million. A huge number, no doubt, but less than hal