Ghoti

Ghoti (pop: 20,204) is a small town on  the Mumbai-Nashik highway NH3 about 2 hours away from Mumbai.


The name has another history though: The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw is said to have joked that the word ‘fish’ could legitimately be spelled ‘ghoti,’ by using the ‘gh’ sound from ‘enough,’ the ‘o’ sound from ‘women’ and the ‘ti’ sound from ‘action.’Just one problem with the well-worn anecdote: there’s not a shred of evidence that Shaw, though a noted advocate for spelling reform, ever brought up ghoti. Scholars have searched high and low through Shaw’s writings and have never found him suggesting ghoti as a comical respelling of fish. The true origins of ghoti go back to 1855, before Shaw was even born. In December of that year, the publisher Charles Ollier sent a letter to his good friend Leigh Hunt, a noted poet and literary critic. "My son William has hit upon a new method of spelling ‘Fish,’" Ollier wrote. You guessed it: good old ghoti.
NYT

A change on the way?

From: The decline of the dollar
Currencies rise and fall over time because countries really do get richer and poorer. Dig something valuable up from under the ground, or devise products or services that people value, and your money will be worth more. Let your industries fall behind, or allow inflation to debase the value of your money, and its global standing will decline.
The puzzle is that there's no real evidence that the economic prospects of Western Europe have suddenly improved 40% compared with the U.S. This makes it tempting to assign the dollar's drop to the customary moodiness of currency markets, in which traders make guesses about the future and inevitably get things wrong for years on end.
There may be something more significant afoot this time, though. It has little to do with the economies of Europe (or of Canada, Australia or New Zealand, whose dollars have made big gains against the U.S. version). Instead, the real action involves the countries whose currencies haven't gained on the dollar despite dramatically improved economic prospects relative to those of the U.S.
China is the most obvious example. But there's also Saudi Arabia and its Persian Gulf neighbors, overflowing again with oil wealth. Even Japan, while not exactly booming, has seen its currency remain curiously weak during the dollar's long fall.
Why haven't these countries' currencies been gaining on the dollar? Because their governments won't let them. China's dollar peg, established in the mid-1990s, is often portrayed in the U.S. as a mercantilist attempt to sell more stuff here (if the Chinese yuan is cheap relative to the dollar, imports from China are cheaper too). But there's much more to it than that: by reining in the often pointless fluctuations of currency markets, countries can bring stability and encourage trade.
That's what the U.S. and the world's other big economies did during the 25 years after World War II. The Bretton Woods system, named after the New Hampshire resort town where the agreements were drawn up, brought unprecedented growth in global prosperity by bringing order to financial markets that depression and war had turned upside down.
But the very prosperity that Bretton Woods enabled was its undoing. As Germany and France returned to the ranks of major economic powers, and Japan began its climb to get there, the exchange rates set up after the war and adjusted only slightly afterward made no sense anymore. Attempts to update the system collapsed in 1971, and the world's major economies moved to freely floating currencies. The transition wasn't pretty: stock markets plummeted, banks failed, oil exporters jacked up prices and inflation raged--especially in the U.S.
These days, China and the other countries participating in what some have called Bretton Woods II export so much more to the U.S. than they import, they find themselves with hundreds of billions of dollars that they don't know what to do with. Up to now they've been content to recycle most of them by buying Treasury bills and other U.S. securities. The U.S. has enjoyed the low interest rates that have resulted, while China, the gulf states and Japan haven't wanted to face the consequence that by selling dollars, they would decrease the value of their remaining dollar holdings.
This is an arrangement that can't go on forever. It should unravel; that's the way of economic change and progress. But there's no plan in place to make it happen in an orderly fashion. The fear that the ensuing adjustment might be even more chaotic than in the 1970s probably explains most of the dollar's recent decline. It's not that we Americans have gotten a lot poorer. It's that we might be about to.

1967-1976 - rock music's miracle decade?

Henrik Franzon is a 34 year-old Swedish statistician who's spent the last ten years crunching lists, and in particular those weird quantifications of the unquantifiable, critics' lists. Franzon has taken all the music critics' lists he can find, fed them into his computer, and come up with a website called Acclaimed Music, a list of lists which lays out "the 3000 most recommended albums and songs of all time".
From 1957-1966 there are 10 albums that reach the Top 100 most acclaimed. The artists who make them are Miles Davis, James Brown, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Otis Redding, John Coltrane and The Beach Boys.
1967-1976 is the miracle decade -- 48 albums that reach the top 100 are produced. I won't mention them all, but they're made by people like the Velvet Underground, The Beatles and various Beatles solo projects, The Doors, Neil Young, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Joni Mitchell, Pink Floyd, Stevie Wonder, and so on.
1977-1986 produces 18 albums that reach the Top 100 most-acclaimed. Punk has shaken things up; the critically-acclaimed albums are from The Sex Pistols, Television, The Clash, Elvis Costello. There's a Cold Wave -- Bowie, Kraftwerk, Joy Division. Then there's 80s stuff like Michael Jackson, REM, Prince, The Jesus and Mary Chain and The Smiths.
You might expect it all to be downhill after this, but surprisingly the 1987-1996 decade does a little better than the one before it, with 20 albums considered vital by critics. Big names: Prince, U2, REM and Guns n Roses, Public Enemy and De La Soul reprazenting for rap, Sonic Youth, The Pixies and Nirvana bringing grunge, Massive Attack and Portishead inventing Trip Hop, Primal Scream and My Bloody Valentine and Oasis doing the Creation label proud, and Beck innovating in California. Surprisingly, this decade's diversity yields more classics than punk's energy did.
But from there the decline is rapid. In the pathetic bathos of 1997-2006 just three albums can match the classics of the past, say the critics. Even worse, it's all distinctly retro. We get Radiohead retreading prog, and The Strokes and The White Stripes going "back to basics" with primal garage guitar rock.
From Click Opera

Arms and the Man

According to the 2007 Small Arms Survey report by the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studies:
The United States has 90 guns for every 100 citizens, making it the most heavily armed society in the world.
U.S. citizens own 270 million of the world's 875 million known firearms. About 4.5 million of the 8 million new guns manufactured worldwide each year are purchased in the United States.
India had the world's second-largest civilian gun arsenal, with an estimated 46 million firearms outside law enforcement and the military, though this represented just four guns per 100 people there.
China, ranked third with 40 million privately held guns, had 3 firearms per 100 people.
Germany, France, Pakistan, Mexico, Brazil and Russia were next in the ranking of country's overall civilian gun arsenals.
On a per-capita basis, Yemen had the second most heavily armed citizenry behind the United States, with 61 guns per 100 people, followed by Finland with 56, Switzerland with 46, Iraq with 39 and Serbia with 38.
France, Canada, Sweden, Austria and Germany were next, each with about 30 guns per 100 people, while many poorer countries often associated with violence ranked much lower. Nigeria, for instance, had just one gun per 100 people.
The report, which relied on government data, surveys and media reports to estimate the size of world arsenals, estimated there were 650 million civilian firearms worldwide, and 225 million held by law enforcement and military forces.
Five years ago, the Small Arms Survey had estimated there were a total of 640 million firearms globally.
Only about 12 percent of civilian weapons are thought to be registered with authorities.

Internet Advertising in the Financial Industry

When Axis Bank decided to do a re-branding exercise in the first week of August, it was no easy task to tell its 6.5 million customers that their bank now had a new name. A mass campaign was under way, but customers don’t expect to receive this sort of information via a TV commercial. What was needed was a more personal approach to supplement the corporate advertising. Axis Bank realized rightly that communication of this kind should be of a more personal nature, something that technology could help them achieve.
Fifteen days prior to the name change, Axis Bank started flashing the message on the 2,500 ATM screens it has across the country, reaching about five lakh people a day, according to Hemant Kaul, president, retail banking, Axis Bank. The bank also sent out about 100,000 SMS alerts a day, using this platform as well to get the message across. When customers were updated on their bank accounts, the message was preceded by a line informing them of the name change. The bank has 1.3 million mobile banking customers.
Axis Bank also put up banners on popular mobile websites like Airtel Live! and Reliance World. Interested customers could enquire about Axis Bank’s products by clicking on the banners.
This led to 4,500 leads in the first week, according to Prasanth Mohanachandran, executive director, Digital Services, at Ogilvy & Mather, which executed the campaign.
The reason Axis Bank opted for the mobile web campaign, despite low penetration, was because it wanted to reach tech savvy, high-end customers, says Mohanachandran. The mobile campaign was executed in conjunction with mobile agency Enpocket.
O&M also developed a website for Axis Bank called Whatsinaname.in, which was promoted through a viral campaign. On the website, people could upload their photos and provide four options on what their name could be. Everyone else could vote for what that person was called and the results were reported to the user. The objective was to drive home the key message: Everything is the same, except the name. The website is still live, and about 5,000 photos have been uploaded, according to Mohanachandran. Kaul of Axis Bank adds that 6,000 links were sent by people who saw the viral in the first few days.
The display advertising campaign comprising banners was live across portals like Rediff and Yahoo! when the campaign started, but has now been focused on financial websites like Moneycontrol, NDTV Profit and Rediff Money because the target audience now is the segment seeking financial information.
Axis Bank also tried search marketing for the first four days, for users who keyed in UTI Bank, to inform them about the new web address through a sponsored search result. The bank turned to contextual advertising, which was executed in conjunction with digital agency Konterra. The agency placed text ads in its network of 128 websites wherever UTI Bank was mentioned.
According to Kaul, the bank refrained from spamming customers with unwanted e-mail and relied instead on display advertising and viral marketing. The impact of the campaign was such that the 60,000 visits a day to the website (which automatically redirects the visitor from www.utibank.com to www.axisbank.com) increased to 350,000 visits a day when the campaign started. Kaul adds, Besides informing our existing customers, we also managed to attract many new customers to the website.
Axis Bank, the erstwhile UTI Bank, has a capitalisation of Rs 355.7 crore and is the third-largest private bank in India.
(from AgencyFAQs)

On the 60th anniversary of India's Independence

On the 60th anniversary of India's Independence, it feels good to know that India has people like Prakash Singh, retired director general, Border Security Forces. He can take credit for the Supreme Court ruling in September 2006 that will bring about sweeping police reforms in India. About 10 years ago, he filed a PIL to implement the report of the Indian National Police Commission set up in 1977. His objective was, he says, “to free the police from the stranglehold of politicians and making it accountable to the laws of the land and the Constitution of the country”.
The extraordinary but little-known Supreme Court ruling will definitely achieve this. It will fundamentally alter the functioning of the police force for the first time since 1861. It requires the establishment of three institutions at the state level: a State Security Commission, for policies and directives; a Police Establishment Board, to decide all transfers, postings and promotions; and a Police Complaints Authority, to inquire into allegations of police misconduct.
The clock on this police reform is ticking. States were required to adhere to the Supreme Court’s directive by January 2007; this has been extended to 31 March 2007. In the coming months, we will see an independent police force for the first time in this country. With it, less opportunity for police misconduct. Lower probability of another Sohrabuddin fake encounter. Fewer moral cul-de-sacs for people to get trapped in.
(from Sohrabbudin’s encounter by Ramesh Ramanathan in LiveMint)

The Irrational Voter

Bryan Caplan, a professor of economics at George Mason University, in his book "The Myth of the Rational Voter", claims, 'In a democracy voters systematically favor irrational policies', adding, 'rational politicians give them what they want.'
Caplan says that 'ignorant voters do not vote randomly'. He theorizes "Four Biases" that makes voters demand policies that actually makes them worse off:
1. In a complex world, voters don't understand how the pursuit of profits can lead to public benefits: therefore voters have an "anti-market bias".
2. People don't understand how foreigners help the economy, and foreigners are often made scapegoats. Hence there is an "anti-foreign bias".
3. Voters think that prosperity equates with employment when in reality a nation's "output" or production is what really counts. Caplan calls this "make-work bias". The make-work bias is best illustrated by a story, perhaps apocryphal, of an economist who visits China under Mao Zedong. He sees hundreds of workers building a dam with shovels. He asks: “Why don't they use a mechanical digger?” “That would put people out of work,” replies the foreman. “Oh,” says the economist, “I thought you were making a dam. If it's jobs you want, take away their shovels and give them spoons.”
For an individual, the make-work bias makes some sense. He prospers if he has a job. For the nation as a whole, however, what matters is not whether people have jobs, but how they do them. The more people produce, the greater the general prosperity. It helps, therefore, if people shift from less productive occupations to more productive ones. Economists, recalling that before the industrial revolution 95% of Americans were farmers, worry far less about downsizing than ordinary people do.
4. Caplan calls the final one "pessimism bias". Meaning, voters will always think that they're worse-off than they really are. They fallaciously think that economic conditions are bad by merely looking at prices of petrol, or onions. Naturally, this "pessimism bias" is likely to be exploited by the opposition: Vote for me, and things will get better.

IIT - is the brand better than the education?

Consider this from Professor Dheeraj Sanghi of IIT-Kanpur's Computer Science department....
"Compared to the best institutions in the world, IITs' quality of education is suspect. Our graduates do well because we take the best, and a small amount of value addition can turn them into gold.
But if you consider the value addition that many good US universities provide to an average student, no Indian college can come anywhere close. You study in IIT because they provide the best education in India (and to a large extent in Asia), and they have the best brand name, but purely in terms of quality of education, lots of universities in US will be better. For almost a decade, we had kept open a channel of admission for NRIs through SAT scores. None of our illustrious alumni settled in USA thought about sending their sons and daughters to IITs. (I did my MS and PhD from University of Maryland, College Park. Quality of under-graduate education there was certainly better than at IITs.)"

What in the world is web 2.0?

If you google "define: web 2.0", this is what you get from wikipedia....
"Web 2.0 is a term often applied to a perceived ongoing transition of the World Wide Web from a collection of websites to a full-fledged computing platform serving web applications to end users. Ultimately Web 2.0 services are expected to replace desktop computing applications for many purposes"
Awesome. But what does it mean? I for one don't have the foggiest notion.
McKinsey has something crisper. They describe web 2.0 as a group of technologies, which rely on user collaboration and include Web services, peer-to-peer networking, blogs, podcasts, and online social networks.

Blogs (short for Web logs) are online journals or diaries hosted on a Web site and often distributed to other sites or readers using RSS (see below).
Collective intelligence refers to any system that attempts to tap the expertise of a group rather than an individual to make decisions. Technologies that contribute to collective intelligence include collaborative publishing and common databases for sharing knowledge.
Mash-ups are aggregations of content from different online sources to create a new service. An example would be a program that pulls apartment listings from one site and displays them on a Google map to show where the apartments are located.
Peer-to-peer networking (sometimes called P2P) is a technique for efficiently sharing files (music, videos, or text) either over the Internet or within a closed set of users. Unlike the traditional method of storing a file on one machine—which can become a bottleneck if many people try to access it at once—P2P distributes files across many machines, often those of the users themselves. Some systems retrieve files by gathering and assembling pieces of them from many machines.
Podcasts are audio or video recordings—a multimedia form of a blog or other content. They are often distributed through an aggregator, such as iTunes.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) allows people to subscribe to online distributions of news, blogs, podcasts, or other information.
Social networking refers to systems that allow members of a specific site to learn about other members’ skills, talents, knowledge, or preferences. Commercial examples include Facebook and LinkedIn. Some companies use these systems internally to help identify experts.
Web services are software systems that make it easier for different systems to communicate with one another automatically in order to pass information or conduct transactions. For example, a retailer and supplier might use Web services to communicate over the Internet and automatically update each other’s inventory systems.
Wikis, such as Wikipedia, are systems for collaborative publishing. They allow many authors to contribute to an online document or discussion.

Does Long Tail distribution fuel terrorism?

There is a popular theory that the internet, and information technology in general will substantially lower the transaction costs of selling hard to find products and services and increase the collective share of niche markets, information and viewpoints. Chris Anderson in his wildly popular book, “The Long Tail” calls these niche products and services the long tail of markets.

He claims that internet driven distribution will be able to cater to minority tastes, and individuals will be offered greater choice, and will be able select items that they may never even have known existed. He argues that by destroying the current model where popularity is currently determined by the lowest common denominator, a long tail model may lead to improvement in a society's level of culture.

This seems to be true for business. Some of the most successful Internet businesses like eBay (auctions), Amazon (retail) and Netflix (video rental) have delivered stunningly successful businesses by leveraging the Long Tail as part of their business models.

However, the same may not be true for culture. The counter view in fact is more frightening, and may well be more correct.

Cass Sunstein, a Law professor at the University of Chicago in his book, Republic.com has argued that the internet causes us to become more extremist and close-minded by exposing us to very selected and biased array of viewpoints. He describes a world where “you need not come across topics and views that you have not sought out. Without any difficulty, you are able to see exactly what you want to see, no more and no less.”

Christine Rosen, author of “Preaching Eugenics” says that we have moved into a world of “egocasting”—a world where we exercise an unparalleled degree of control over what we watch and what we hear. We can consciously avoid ideas, sounds, and images that we don’t agree with or don’t enjoy.

Our technologies—especially the Internet—are encouraging group polarization: “As the customization of our communications universe increases, society is in danger of fragmenting, shared communities in danger of dissolving.”

When you combine these philosophies with Huntington’s theory in The Clash of Civilizations, it paints a frightening picture. Huntington says that the great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural and that the fault lines of civilizations are the battle lines of the future.

By encouraging the polarization of groups, the internet may well be fueling the growth of terrorism. The fact of the matter is that this is something we are seeing today all around us. Along with the growth of the internet, we have seen a growing cultural assertiveness, which is seeing the rise of fundamentalism and terrorism. And this is largely a middle class phenomenon. - the group which has been exposed to the internet the most. From 9/11 to the UK bombers, the terrorists were all middle class educated people.

To counter this, Sunstien says that “People should be exposed to materials that they would not have chosen in advance,” he notes. “Unplanned, unanticipated encounters are central to democracy itself.”