To live unconventionally
Imagine a conversation with your doctor that goes like this:
“What do you do for work?” the doctor asked me at the beginning of the interview.
“Well, I’m trying to start my own social movement.”
(There was a long pause, but he didn’t ask anything else about that. Instead, he looked at the next item on the list.)
“Do you take any medications?”
“Not usually, but when I need to, I buy them in Africa.”
(Another pause.)
“Do you exercise regularly?”
“Yes, I just ran a marathon on a cruise ship last week!”
Such a person should surely be interesting.
That’s how I first read about Chris Guillebeau (via Cal Newport).
So when Chris mentioned on his blog that he has a manifesto coming up soon, I was eagerly waiting. He calls it a “A Brief Guide to World Domination: How to Live a Remarkable Life in a Conventional World”.
Well, surely, there have been many people who have made tall claims over the years, why this should be any different? Because this guy walks the talk. What else can you say about someone who has visited 83 countries so far and he’s only 30 years of age. His goal is to visit the remaining 115 countries by April 7, 2013. How’s that for a goal?
What I liked about the manifesto is that it reminds me of a rule that I’ve been following off late: “Enough fundas, Back to fundamentals.” The manifesto does not tell you anything earth-shattering but makes you think about the simple basics of your life.
If you choose the path of being “just like everybody else”, then you’re already set because that is what majority of the world does.
If you choose the path of “non-conformity”, then be prepared to face all the problems but at the end of it all, you’ll get to live the life that you want (assuming that’s what you want).
If you want to truly go for BHA goals (Big Hairy Audacious Goals), then you need to take care of yourself and contribute to others as well. The latter is not simply charity, but there are several ways. After all, the greatest joy a passionate programmer or artist can get is when he/she sees someone using/admiring what they created and they are getting benefitted from it. And so on.
All this reminds me of this quote by John Davis:
You all laugh at me because I’m different, I laugh at you because you’re all the same.
That’s what I say to myself when people stare at me in the mornings when I’m running with a fuel belt around my waist. Hey, it may look funny, but I need that water while I’m running so that I don’t end up dehydrating (which is bad, speaking from experience). So I may look unconventional, but I need that water, and that’s how I want to do running.
So what else have I done unconventionally?
Super Crunchers
Today, I re-read a book called Super
Crunchers: How Anything Can Be Predicted
So what is supercrunching?
Now something is changing. Business and government professionals are relying more and more on databases to guide their decisions. The story of hedge funds is really the story of a new breed of number crunchers - call them Super Crunchers - who have analyzed large datasets to discover empirical correlations between seemingly unrelated things. Want to hedge a large purchase of euros? Turns out you should sell a carefully balanced portfolio of twenty-six other stocks and commodities that might include Wal-Mart stock.
What is Super Crunching? It is statistical analysis that impacts real-world decisions. Super Crunching predictions usually bring together some combination of size, speed and scale. The sizes of datasets are really big - both in the number of observations and in the number of variables. The speed of the analysis is increasing. We often witness the real-time crunching of numbers as the data come hot off the press. And the scale of the impact is sometimes truly huge. This isn’t a bunch of egghead academics cranking out provocative journal articles. Super Crunching is done by or for decision makers who are looking for a better way to do things.
This is best explained by the chess example:
We tend to think that the chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov lost to the Deep Blue computer because of IBM’s smarter software. That software is really a gigantic database that ranks the power of different positions. The speed of the computer is important, but in large part it was the computer’s ability to access a database of 700,000 grandmaster chess games that was decisive. Kasparov’s intuitions lost out to data-based decision making.
(emphasis mine)
The book starts off with the example of Orley Ashenfelter, a Princeton economics professor as well as founder and editor of the Journal of Wine Economics who wanted to apply supercrunching techniques to predict whether a wine from a particular year would be a good wine or not. He ended up with the following equation:
Wine quality = 12.145 + 0.00117 winter rainfall + 0.0614 average growing season temperature - 0.00386 harvest rainfall
You can imagine the commotion that followed. The wine experts brushed off this theory and that numbers can predict the wine quality better than they can. After all, “Just as it’s more accurate to see the movie, shouldn’t it be more accurate to actually taste the wine?”
And yet, the equation did indeed make better predictions, especially with the prediction that 1989 and 1990 wines would be bestsellers.
Why television and movies are captivating
From Philip K. Dick’s 1978 article “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later” (emphasis mine):
The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words. George Orwell made this clear in his novel 1984. But another way to control the minds of people is to control their perceptions. If you can get them to see the world as you do, they will think as you do. Comprehension follows perception.
How do you get them to see the reality you see? After all, it is only one reality out of many. Images are a basic constituent: pictures. This is why the power of TV to influence young minds is so staggeringly vast. Words and pictures are synchronized. The possibility of total control of the viewer exists, especially the young viewer. TV viewing is a kind of sleep- learning. An EEG of a person watching TV shows that after about half an hour the brain decides that nothing is happening, and it goes into a hypnoidal twilight state, emitting alpha waves. This is because there is such little eye motion.
In addition, much of the information is graphic and therefore passes into the right hemisphere of the brain, rather than being processed by the left, where the conscious personality is located. Recent experiments indicate that much of what we see on the TV screen is received on a subliminal basis. We only imagine that we consciously see what is there.
The bulk of the messages elude our attention; literally, after a few hours of TV watching, we do not know what we have seen. Our memories are spurious, like our memories of dreams; the blanks are filled in retrospectively. And falsified. We have participated unknowingly in the creation of a spurious reality, and then we have obligingly fed it to ourselves. We have colluded in our own doom.
(via email from Anirudh)
When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.
– Steve Jobs quoted in Wired (February 1996)
Two unofficial traffic rules in India
- Ignore all honking. Most of the honking is by nincompoops who want
to save 30 seconds in travel but waste away their lives during the
rest of the day.
- Solution: We should ban all horns. It’s purpose has been lost. Reduce the noise pollution, please.
- Never drive in front of an auto, beside an auto or behind an auto.
In other words, stay away. As far away as possible.
- Solution: We should reduce the angle by which autos can swerve, at least by half. All hail the king of the road.
Why does crowdsourcing work?
Tim O’Reilly’s definition of Web 2.0 makes it clear that “crowdsourcing” is one of the defining features of Web 2.0, not only RIAs:
“The service automatically gets better the more people use it.”
Crowdsourcing is about taking it to the next step where people ‘contribute’ something to the ’system’.
There are many people and companies trying to make crowdsourcing work in different areas. For example, at Kluster, the participants get to design a product, etc. and the participants who back the winning idea get to share the reward. What is interesting is the story behind Kluster:
Kaufman came up with the idea for Kluster at his last startup, Mophie, which makes iPod accessories and was recently sold to mStation for an undisclosed sum. One of Mophie’s hit products is the Bevy, an all-in-one iPod Shuffle case, bottle opener, cord-wrap, and keychain. The company designed it at last year’s MacWorld conference in 72 hours with input from 30,000 customers using software that was a precursor to Kluster. According to Kaufman, Mophie sold hundreds of thousands of the $15 cases.
And from the June 2006 Wired magazine article:
Melcarek (a registered user at InnoCentive.com) solved a problem that stumped the in-house researchers at Colgate-Palmolive. The giant packaged goods company needed a way to inject fluoride powder into a toothpaste tube without it dispersing into the surrounding air. Melcarek knew he had a solution by the time he’d finished reading the challenge: Impart an electric charge to the powder while grounding the tube. The positively charged fluoride particles would be attracted to the tube without any significant dispersion.
“It was really a very simple solution,” says Melcarek. Why hadn’t Colgate thought of it? “They’re probably test tube guys without any training in physics.” Melcarek earned $25,000 for his efforts. Paying Colgate-Palmolive’s R&D staff to produce the same solution could have cost several times that amount – if they even solved it at all.
More examples are:
- Dell Idea Storm where customers vote for what products they want Dell to do next - this is how Dell’s recent introduction of Linux laptops happened.
- Get Satisfaction which is “people-powered customer service”
- Intel asking the crowd on what is the next Google
- MicroPledge and co fund os where people pledge their money for software ideas they like, once a good amount is reached, someone takes up that pledge and works on it. If he/she completes it successfully, they get the money and the crowd gets the software they want. This is the crowdsourced version of a bounty.
- Sell-a-Band where people pledge their money on bands they like. Sufficient money implies the band gets to record an album with that money. If the album sells, the crowd, the band and the SellaBand website share the profit.
- Kiva for microfinance loans to entrepreneurs in developing countries.
- Wesabe for personal finance.
- CrowdSpirit for electronics.
- Threadless for T-shirts.
- Everywhere Mag for a travel magazine.
- Crowdsourcing.com is crowdsourcing a book on crowdsourcing. Say that fast thrice.
- We can also include Youtube under the entertainment category.
- And many many more.
Heck, we even have an O’Reilly book on ‘Programming Collective Intelligence’ (which has been sitting on my to-read list for too long).
The biggest and best example, of course, is Wikipedia, one of the top 10 largest websites in the world.
The article that blew my mind (and got me wondering about crowdsourcing in the first place) is the Wikipedia page on British crown succession (via IndiaUncut) - this page lists 1388+ people who are in the succession line for the crown!
But I wonder, why did Wikipedia work? Or rather, what makes people contribute to Wikipedia?
The best research on this topic that I found was the article What Motivates Wikipedians? in the CACM monthly magazine:
I wonder if the companies mentioned above are specifically tapping into some of these motivations.
The article goes on to explain the relative importance of these motivations in their survey. I was seriously surprised at how high Ideology and Values rank here! If you get a chance, do read the whole article, it’s a good piece of research.
Another interesting research was the paper Becoming Wikipedian: transformation of participation in a collaborative online encyclopedia which traces how a casual visitor starts reading Wikipedia and goes on to become a member of the community, and how the social structure and technological aspects enable this.
I think I’m now beginning to understand what Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia) said when he was asked the same question:
Love. It isn’t very popular in technical circles to say a lot of mushy stuff about love, but frankly it’s a very very important part of what holds our project together.
I have always viewed the mission of Wikipedia to be much bigger than just creating a killer website. We’re doing that of course, and having a lot of fun doing it, but a big part of what motivates us is our larger mission to affect the world in a positive way.
…
Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.
Although this reasoning may apply to Wikipedia which is an encyclopedia and information-centric, I wonder whether the same applies to the other examples above. For example, consider Threadless.com for T-shirt designs… what are the motivations for people in that community? And how much does the website’s social and technological structure play a role? What are the magic ingredients that make a crowdsourcing website become successful?
Maybe I should crowdsource this question. Hmmm.
Maybe it is not different from any other kind of website which becomes successful but I think crowdsourcing websites are distinct from content websites like SmashingMagazine.com or e-commerce websites like Amazon/eBay, etc.
Now, the next question is has anybody successfully crowdsourced anything in an India-specific way?
Update on 2008 May 13: ReadWriteWeb has a similar list.
Urban Development
Around the recent gastroenteritis scare in Bangalore, NDTV was running a poll:
Then, there was this whole one hour dedicated to hearing viewpoints from Veerappa Moily, Swathi Ramanathan and the general public regarding Bangalore’s infrastructure.
Okay, okay, I know most of you by now are saying “Oh, come on, don’t you have anything else to talk about? You’re so boring”. Maybe I am, but when I shift most of my “outside” chores to the middle of the day just to avoid traffic, and hate going out on Sundays because of long queues for everything, it affects me and I’d like to know if the situation can improve or not.
I liked how Swathi Ramanathan explained that the business people have come together to pitch in their part. The way they’ve analyzed the 15 critical junctions leading to the Bangalore International Airport which should have good roads otherwise traffic will bottle up here and will throw us into further crisis, err okay, I’ll stop here.
It reminded me of the Singapore 1:1 Island Exhibition I visited on Day 12 (Jan 02, 2008) of my Singapore trip.
(To be honest, I was a little hesitant to write about this topic, even though this is my space, my blog. The last time I wrote something, people wrote in to say that I’m not Indian enough because I talked negative about our current situation and asked me to go ‘home’ to Singapore or USA!)
You can see many more photos in my Day 12 photo album.
I absolutely loved their Skyline newsletters where they discuss the upcoming developments. Do check out their last Nov/Dec 2007 edition. I can almost guarantee you that you’ll come away inspired, especially the Design Wonders section.
It’s not so much about Singapore that amazed me, it’s the fact that they have such a vision about the place they want to live in, and the effort that goes into planning of such things, the importance given to design and architecture, and finally ensuring proper execution.
And it is a seemingly open process. Visiting the Urban Redevelopment Authority website shows the first sidebar on the left which says “I need info on Master Plan / Land Use Planning / etc.”
Maybe that’s what we need for cities like Bangalore?
It would help if things were more transparent, instead of the government hiding facts like a part of Lalbagh that would be razed for the metro. Or something like what Stefan Magdalinski did with TheyWorkForYou?
CitizenMatters.in seems to be a step in the right direction, but at the end of the day, it’s just competing with the hyperbolic news channels. I think a more useful idea would be a website with a categorical depth of works happening in the different parts of the cities, the government offices involved, what is being done, and so on. But the website is still useful, for example, via an article on ward works came to know about this:
Coalition Against Corruption Guru Ravindranath Tel: 65734444
If you have noticed any governmental apathy in your area, CAC and Guru Ravindranath will guide you in fixing things.
Question is: Would I call Mr. Guru if I do come across something? I have this eternal fear regarding these issues about getting into something that I’ll regret.
Useful Websites for India
Like a broken record, I keep coming back to What are the killer web applications for India? So, I decided to make a list.
A list of websites that are useful for most people in India. But what kind of websites am I looking at? The website should be something useful enough to compel a person without internet access to go to a cybercafe just to access this website.
Here’s what I have so far:
- RedBus.in for bus tickets
- Also KSRTC.in for govt bus tickets in Karnataka
- IRCTC.co.in for train tickets
- Inasra.com to book hotel rooms
- HungryZone.com (especially HungryBangalore.com) for restaurant reservations and home delivery
- YellowPages.Sulekha.com for finding local businesses and services
- BookMyShow.com for movie tickets
- MapMyIndia for maps and driving directions (even in Bangalore)
- Handiman for handyman services
Note: The definition of usefulness here is in terms of the concept. However, these websites are not verified in any sense. There’s no guarantee that they are good or even trustworthy, but I would encourage you to check out their services if they are useful. That’s the whole point.
I’ll keep updating this list as and when I find more such websites.
Update: Added BookMyShow, KRSTC.in, MapMyIndia.
Update on 2008 May 15 : Added Handiman
How to defend India?
I’ve been provoked and I can’t stop thinking about it.
Incident 1. It all started on Day 2 of my Singapore trip (Dec 23 Sun) when a hotel owner was too friendly. Maybe he didn’t have much work, but anyway, he got pretty chatty with us and was asking about how we like Singapore. All we wanted to do was eat noodles.
He started talking about his visit to India, and like most Singaporeans, he had been on a Buddhist pilgrimage to India. I can still remember the angst in his voice.
He said that the central government in India is good but the state governments are bad. Strike 1. I had to agree.
He said that it’s not a safe place for businessmen to invest money. He said one of his close friends made huge investment, but when the government changed, the policies changed and the friend made a huge loss. Strike 2. I don’t know much about such things, but I can imagine that it is possible.
He said that India hasn’t advanced enough, there’s still too much poverty, there’s still so much chaos. He said ‘take a look at China’. For example, if the parents invest some amount with the government, they’ll give back 10 times the amount in 10 years, or something like that, and this is guaranteed by the government to safeguard the child’s future. I don’t remember the numbers he used but I was impressed with what he said. Strike 3.
I was beaten and didn’t know how to fight back.
I’m not a patriotic guy. I don’t go around burning boards written in non-state languages, nor do I go around speaking only in Hindi and refusing to speak in English. But I believe in the concept of India as a nation and I instinctively feel that I should defend my country when someone makes says negative about my country.
But I was stumped. I was completely caught off-guard. I didn’t know what to say. I just nodded. I desperately looked for things to tell him. But I got nothing. Throughout the trip, I kept thinking of things to go back and tell that hotel guy that India is a great country, but what do we really have?
Specifically, the question is:
Post-independence, does India, as a nation, have achievements to be proud of?
I’m not talking about our ancient history or ‘culture’. I’m not talking about what some Indian did when he went to a foreign country, or even someone who went out of his way to achieve something within India (like the paeans being written about Tata Motors and their Nano car).
I’m talking specifically about the 1. post-independence era and the 2. ‘as a nation’ part.
A week after that incident, I was still trying to forget about it. But the same thing happened again on Day 9 (Dec 30 Sun) with the store owner of a bookstore that Abishek and myself randomly walked into. We had a long conversation about Buddhism and our beliefs of God and how we pray. It’s surreal that we randomly started talking our intimate spiritual beliefs with a complete stranger. But such is life. And then she mentioned the same exact things that the hotel owner did. She specifically mentioned that she was appalled at the poverty when she went to Bodh Gaya.
Yes, we are talking about poverty, not just about the beggars on the busy roads of Bangalore, but he fighting-for-food kind, the kind that we saw in ‘Swades’ movie.
Incident 2. After visiting the Kaala Chakra exhibition, I realized how influential India has really been, especially to most of South East Asia, from language to politics to trade, Indian-related stuff is everywhere in South East Asia. I used to wonder about why Tamil is such a common language here in Singapore, and only after I visited this exhibition, I realized that this goes back to the B.C. ages!
Notice the irony that I got to know more about Indian history and influence when I’m outside India.
Probably because there is such importance given to history and culture in Singapore. But people in India have no time for such things, we are still fighting and struggling for our basic needs.
This immediately reminded me of “Maslow’s hierarchy of needs”:
We are still struggling in Levels 1-3, that’s why we are just touching Level 4, and we’re a long way from reaching Level 5 of Self Actualization. At least, my point of view.
Incident 3. I know there will be lots of people that say that I’m wrong, and that everything’s fine in India. (It reminds me of Rahul Bose in the “Everybody Says I’m Fine” movie.)
The problem is that everything’s fine as long as nothing bad happens to you or you witness it, only then you realize how bad the situation is. God forbid, you end up in an accident, only then you realize the problems with the police, the hospital, the insurance, and so on. The situation is the same everywhere, irrespective of the aspect of life.
I don’t know how better or worse we are compared to other countries, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be in a better situation. There is simply no reason to! We have the money, the people, the resources…
Incident 4. I came to know recently that at a premier medical institution in Bangalore, teachers are openly telling students that if they don’t “help” the teachers (i.e. pay them money), they will make sure that 30% of the students will fail! I am not kidding you, this is for real. Where’s the sanctity of education? Where’s the concern for the students’ future? Where’s the concern for encouraging future doctors (especially because the number of doctors is already dwindling)? Where’s the concern about setting precedents for future of medical profession? Even if they don’t think long term, how will students afford this? I know many medical student friends who have struggled to pay the hefty fees, what about these students who simply cannot afford to pay bribes to teachers?
Incident 5. Similarly, lecturers in PUC colleges have stopped teaching in college and they tell students that they are anyway going to tuitions. If not, they should join their own tuitions! What happens to all those students who can’t afford it?
Incident 6. Abishek’s close friend and special effects friend Osmand is a third-generation Indian. When he was about to fly from India to China to visit his relatives, he was abused that he was a Chinese person, and this for a person who’s born and brought up in India his entire life! The difference in attitudes was telling when the Indian immigration officer made him wait for 3 hours to prove that he’s an Indian compared to when he explained, that he’s a third-generation Indian originally hailing from China, to the Chinese immigration officer, he said “Welcome home.” Now, Osmand is as Indian as it gets, irrespective of how it looks. Tell me, who’s the racist here? Osmand is so fed up of this attitude that he wants to go back to China.
