Viswanathan K's Thoughts

One of the concepts of behavioral economics is the principle of loss aversion, i.e., most of us find the pain of losing to be much higher than the joy of winning. A reader of Dan Ariely's blog (Ariely is a professor of behavioral economics) asked him whether, by that principle, people should avoid being sports fans to avoid the pain that their team losing brings? I found Ariely's response very interesting. After pointing out that people aren’t rational (the central tenet of behavioral economics!), he wrote: “Sporting events are not just about the outcome, and if anything, they are more about the ways in which we experience the games as they unfold over time (yes, even the 7-1 Germany vs Brazil game)…The time of the game itself is arguably what provide the largest part of the enjoyment.” Ariely was bang on target. The “enjoyment during the game” factor is why people become sports fans. Fantasy IPL and Fantasy Football take the fan involvement further by allowing fan...

Amazon recently bought Twitch for a billion dollars. If you are wondering what Twitch is, let Peter Kafka and Eric Johnson explain : “For the uninitiated, Twitch is a platform for making and talking about videos of videogame play. About a million users a month record themselves playing videogames, while the rest — pegged at 50 million unique viewers in July — watch and comment on the videos.” If that sounds insane to you, consider what John Gruber has to say : “The future of TV is online streaming, not traditional “channels” that come through cable or satellite…My son and his friends watch far more YouTube content than they do traditional TV. Cable TV is dying.” Seth Godin commented on how he had a similar idea way back in 1989! Of course, back then, it meant making “videotapes of people playing video games”, not online streaming. Godin though isn’t bitter: “No, the hard part isn't merely thinking of an idea…The truly hard part is, 25 years later, sticking with it lo...

I love the American way of defining “free” on the Internet: it’s free as in beer and free as in speech. But of course, as an American economist famously said: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” That price started innocently enough: ads. But the Internet gradually moved from showing ads the way existing media did (same ads for everyone) to showing personalized ads. But to do that, sites needed to know more and more about you. That is why Ethan Zuckerman reminds us : “The internet spies at us at every twist and turn not because Zuckerberg (Facebook), Brin, and Page (Google) are scheming, sinister masterminds, but due to good intentions gone awry.” Initially, Google’s ads were based on what you searched for but they didn’t (couldn’t?) track you all the time (That was the era when families still shared desktops). Then social networking happened and websites knew your ID. Then came the personalized devices for individuals: smartphones and tablets. Suddenly, knowing you (or...

I read this article by Joanne McNeil that asked why everyone likes to take pics of the Eiffel Tower? No, not pics with you or your loved one in the foreground (those are memories, or as McNeil says “Images are always linked with contextual metadata of the mind”), the question is about pics that have only the Eiffel Tower in them. Was David Wojnarowicz not joking when he wrote: “I imagine people sleep better at night having these tiny proofs of the existence of the Eiffel Tower in boxes underneath their beds.” Or do we have it all inverted, wonders McNeil: “Photographs that prove the existence of the Eiffel Tower more importantly prove the photographer’s existence.” I click, therefore I am. And that was about as far as McNeil got. It left me wanting for more. I read a few excerpts from Susan Sontag’s book called On Photography that she wrote way back in 1977. Surprisingly, things she wrote then apply even for today’s social media photostream age! She mentions two re...

A few days back, Michael Brown, an unarmed black man was shot dead by cops in a small town called Ferguson in the US. The incident sparked riots and protests to which the cops then responded with a shock and awe approach: they came out dressed like soldiers, sniper tripods and all! Unbelievable. Zeynep Tufekci wrote an article on that from a different perspective : “Ferguson is about many things, starting first with race and policing in America. But it’s also about internet, net neutrality and algorithmic filtering.” Say what??? How did the Internet get dragged into this? Tufekci said one of her friends wondered whether it would become national news. Another friend responded: “Yes Ferguson will make news, another friend tweeted, because… well, here you go: Twitter.” Of course, the friend was right. After all: “Now, we expect documentation, live-feeds, streaming video, real time Tweets.” Soon enough, Tufekci found her Twitter feed filled with Ferguson. But not on F...

Robo-graders, or software that grades essays have been there for some time. But how good/useful is an algorithm to assess the quality of writing? Les Perelman, a critic, says these algorithms don’t understand the meaning (obviously) and just use certain metrics like “length and the presence of pretentious language”: “The fallacy underlying this approach is confusing association with causation. A person makes the observation that many smart college professors wear tweed jackets and then believes that if she wears a tweed jacket, she will be a smart college professor.” Further, Perelman says that once kids know (or guess) how the algorithm works, they will write to suit the algorithm without worrying about content! A couple of students at Harvard demonstrated just that by writing an application that generates gibberish and yet gets rated highly by the algorithm. Then again, as Chaitanya Ramineni, an ETS (Educational Testing Service) researcher, says, “human scoring suffers...

Flipkart was in the news recently because it raised $1 billion in funding to fund its expansion plans and to fight the competition. A couple of days after that, Amazon announced that it was investing $2 billion in its India operations. Why all the interest in the e-commerce market in India? Mostly because India’s smartphone ownership (and hence, Internet access) is rising. All that translates into a huge opportunity. When we visited Goa, I remember our hostess telling me that people even in remote places can now get things whenever it is available, thanks to Flipkart. No wonder that Flipkart said its sales had just hit $1 billion since it was launched. Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, said something similar: “At current scale and growth rates, India is on track to be our fastest country ever to a billion dollars in gross sales.” Online spending in India is expected to hit $8.5 billion by 2016. So how many smartphones are being sold in India? This year, a whopping 225 million sm...

Joshua Topolsky said that Steve Jobs’ famous “the post-PC era” comment was partly a marketing strategy, not just about a technological shift: “In this new world, Apple no longer has to compete on specs and features, nor does it want to…In a post-PC world, the experience of the product is central and significant above all else. It's not the RAM or CPU speed, screen resolution or number of ports which dictate whether a product is valuable; it becomes purely about the experience of using the device.” And so, said Topolsky : “Apple need only delight consumers and tell them that specs and speed are the domain of a dinosaur called the PC…Apple isn't claiming victory in the Space Race -- it's ceding space to the competition…But guess who gets Earth all to itself?” And Jobs was proven right. While PC sales flattened and even fell, tablet sales soared. As MG Siegler wrote this year: “As a standalone business, just based on the last 12 months of revenue, the iPad woul...

Recently, Google alerted the authorities when its algorithms detected that a Gmail user was transmitting child pornography images. The cops then went on to arrest the man. A good thing, no doubt. But it makes one wonder how Google found the image? Are they opening every attachment in every mail? Don’t worry, it’s nothing that invasive. They use an algorithm created by (hold your breath) Microsoft! “Google makes use of Microsoft's PhotoDNA technology to scan emails, and calculate a mathematical hash for an image of child sexual abuse that allows it to recognize photos automatically even if they have been altered. The tech is now also used by both Twitter and Facebook, after Microsoft donated it to the NCMEC in 2009.”` But is this a slippery slope, wonder others? John Hawes, cyber security consultant asks: “There will of course be some who see it as yet another sign of how the twin Big Brothers of state agencies and corporate behemoths have nothing better to do than delve in...

A few weeks back, Facebook published a paper describing a study they had performed on 600,000 of their users without informing them. Facebook increased (or decreased) the number of positive or negative terms showing up in the feeds of certain users. Then it monitored those users’ own posts to see if their mood got affected by what they saw (The answer: it did). The overwhelming reaction, as expected, was fury. John Gruber ranted: “Yes, this is creepy as hell, and indicates a complete and utter lack of respect for their users’ privacy or the integrity of their feed content.” But Jesse Singal wondered what Facebook had done differently? “ So the folks who are outraged about Facebook’s complicity in this experiment seem to basically be arguing that it’s okay when Facebook manipulates their emotions to get them to click on stuff more, or for the sake of in-house experiments about how to make content “more engaging” (that is, to find out how to get them to click on stuff mo...

When I was a kid, I was blown away by the quality of (a volume of) encyclopedias that my cousin from the US gave us. Before you smirk, remember this was the pre-liberalization, pre-Internet, pre-Wikipedia era when people still put on their loin skins and went hunting for their next meal… An event I was very interested in was World War I. And boy, did the encyclopedia had lots of information of that. The one question that never occurred to me until I read this article by Stephen Walt was the following: “We should also ask why it was so difficult to end.” I realized I never gave it any thought because the answer seemed obvious: the war took as long it took for one side to win conclusively. But Walt is really asking a different question: at some point long before the war ended, he says, surely different leaders on both sides must have felt that the body count was too much, that the eventual economic cost of victory would not be worth it, and that they couldn’t even be certain t...

As the Amazon v/s Hachette (one of the Big Publishers) war heated up, a non-Hachette author, John Green, worried if this was a sign of how Amazon was going to start abusing its monopolistic power: “What's ultimately at stake is whether Amazon is going to be able to freely and permanently bully publishers into eventual nonexistence.” (If you are wondering, Amazon increased the delivery time of all Hachette books. And some Hachette books stopped showing up altogether in Amazon search). So is Amazon the bad guy? Well, it certainly isn’t the only bad guy. Hachette was part of the cartel that worked with Apple to artificially keep e-book prices high. This wasn’t just an accusation; the publishers settled matters in a US court in 2013, albeit without admitting guilt. The court ordered all those publishers to re-negotiate e-book prices with everyone, including Apple and Amazon. And it is as part of those negotiations that the war has started. Amazon says the issue isn’t abo...