Author: SK

Switching languages

I used to marvel about how whenever I was in the company of other people from IIT Madras, I would instinctively switch to speaking “IITese“. Words such as “slisha”, “peace”, “rod”, and all others that I would not normally use in normal English when speaking to normal people would suddenly appear in my vocabulary while talking to others from IITM.

I used to consider myself special that I could discriminate thus, and make best use of the languages I know while not discriminating against people who didn’t understand one of the languages, such as IITese. I used to consider this great, but this bubble got broken when my nephew started talking.

This guy is half-Kannadiga, half-Marathi, with a Gult nanny and his parents speak to each other in Hindi. He is now three years old and for over a year now he’s been very comfortable speaking Kannada and Marathi, and to an extent Telugu, Hindi and English (which he’s learning in school) !  The most remarkable thing with him, though, (as with all other multilingual kids, I would imagine) is that he has mapped people to languages. For example, he knows that I speak Kannada and he speaks to me only in Kannada. And while talking to me if his father (who is Marathi) is present, he immediately switches to Marathi to talk to him. Across languages that are very different, he is able to switch easily and seamlessly and moreover know who speaks which language!

There is a downside, though. Once when his mother, who is “supposed to speak to him in Kannada”, tried talking to him in Marathi, he got really angry and wild and asked her to speak in Kannada! Our initial thought was he was being finicky, but I now think it is to do with parsing. When his mother speaks, he has his “Kannada parser” switched on, and if she speaks Marathi, there is a parsing error and it causes great stress on his processor to switch languages. And being a small kid, that makes him cranky and wild!

In other words, this can be considered as another case of Bayesian recognition! It seems like the human mind’s parsing of speech is influenced by the prior distribution of what language the speaker is speaking in. As the first few words come out, we firm up which parser to use, and then it is smooth sailing. For a kid, though, it seems like the prior distribution of parsers is “binary” (one 1, and the rest 0s), which is what makes the wrong speaker wrong language combo annoying for them!

Us human beings are smarter than we think!

R, Windows, Mac, and Bangalore and Chennai Auto Rickshaws

R on Windows is like a Bangalore auto rickshaw, R on Mac is a Chennai auto rickshaw. Let me explain.

For a long time now I’ve been using R for all my data management and manipulation and analysis and what not. Till two months back I did so on a Windows laptop and a desktop. The laptop had 8 GB RAM and the desktop had 16GB RAM. I would handle large datasets, and sometimes when I would try to do something complicated that required the use of more memory space than the computer had, the process would fail, saying “fail to allocate X GB of memory”. On Windows R would not creep into the hard disk, into virtual memory territory.

In other words it was like a Bangalore auto rickshaw, which plies mostly on meter but refuses to come to areas that are outside the driver’s “zone”. A binary decision. A yes or a no. No concept of price discrimination.

The Mac, which I’ve been using for the last two months, behaves differently. This one has only 8GB of RAM, but I’m able to handle large datasets without ever running out of memory. How is this achieved? By means of using the system’s Virtual Memory. This means the system doesn’t run out of memory, I haven’t received the “can’t allocate memory” error even once on this Mac.

So the catch here is that the virtual memory (despite having a SSD hard disk) is painfully slow, and it takes a much longer time for the program to read and write from the memory than it does with the main memory. This means that processes that need more than 8 GB of RAM (I frequently end up running such queries) execute, but take a really long time to do so.

This is like Chennai auto rickshaws, who never say “no” but make sure they charge a price that will well compensate them for the distance and time and trouble and effort, and a bit more.

How do you change Mata Amrita Index?

Over five years ago, I had introduced the concept of the Mata Amrita Index on this blog. Just to refresh your memories, it refers to the probability that a person will hug any random person she meets. You can also define bilateral Mata Amrita Index, which is the probability that a given pair of people hug when they meet.

Now, after I wrote that post I realise that the Mata Amrita Index is a rather cultural thing – some cultures are more predisposed to hugging than others. I, for example, for whatever reason, am quite queasy about hugging and won’t do so unless I know the counterparty quite well. More importantly than the queasiness, I want to avoid the awkwardness when I offer a hug which makes the other person queasy because they are not prepared for it (this happened the very first time I met the person who is now my wife,btw). For others, hugging comes much more naturally, and if such people initiate a hug to me, I’m happy to continue with the process. But with some others I’ve noticed that both of us are not sure if it’s okay to hug and it ends up in a weird handshake while it might have been a hug!

Anyway, the point of this post is whether the bilateral Mata Amrita Index between a pair of people can change over time, and if so, what the conditions are under which it changes. We will leave romantic or hopefully-romantic or possibly-romantic relationships out of this discussion – the human touch works in those situations in completely different ways. So the question is under what circumstances can the bilateral Mata Amrita Index between a pair of people change over time? And let’s be nice on this blog, and discuss only about increase in MAI, not decrease.

So what are the circumstances under which the bilateral MAI between a pair of people increase over time? One is the frequency of meeting. If you meet someone very regularly, you get into a particular routine on how you greet each other – be it a handshake or a hug or a namaste or a feet-touch or a cheek-peck. Since you are meeting each other regularly, both of you remember the established protocol. And both instinctively go for it. Even if you want to change protocol, the other person is so used to it that they continue. And considering that you can’t command someone to hug you (unless you are an “aunty”) you end up sticking to protocol!

If you meet each other infrequently, on the other hand, you are likely to have forgotten whatever protocol existed, and so there is a higher probability of changing protocol, and so there is a chance that you can enhance your Mata Amrita Index. It helps if it’s been so long since you last met that either of you has undergone a culture-changing experience (like moving to a new country, or a new job, or a new school, for example), which can change the way you greet and can use as an excuse if the counterparty objects to your way of greeting.

Then, if you are meeting after a long time and for some reason you have got closer in the interval (in terms of things you’ve spoken about with each other since the last time you met, for example), it is again okay to explore an enhancement of the Mata Amrita Index the next time you meet.

There is also the company you keep. Let’s say A, B and C are meeting. Whether it’s due to their past bilateral MAI, or individual MAI, A and B hug, and then B and C hug. Now it becomes socially awkward for A and C not to hug, so they end up hugging each other, and enhancing their MAI. The next time they meet, this enhancement will be in their mind, and can lead to further enhancement in MAI. This can also work the other way – if you are in a large group and only two of you in that group have a high bilateral MAI, then it becomes awkward for you to hug when everyone else is being all prude and shaking hands. That can decrease MAI.

There is another way the company you keep can end up decreasing MAI. Again, if A,B and C meet, and A-B have a high bilateral MAI. Let’s say that A is meeting C for the first time. Before A hugs B, she evaluates is she is also okay hugging C (since not doing so might be awkward), and that might lead A to not hug B!

This is complicated business! Do you know any way in which the Mata Amrita Index can be enhanced? Or diminished? Do write in!

Health and fitness not a rural concern?

It is now well accepted among nutritionists that excessive consumption of cereals is actually harmful to to health and can lead to problems such as high cholesterol, triglycerides, diabetes and fatness. In response to this, we have a number of new-fad diets such as the paleo and the keto and the Atkins which restrict intake of cereals. Even though the number of people practicing such diets might be low, in general there seems to be a trend away from cereal consumption.

Anyway, yesterday Mint put out a set of charts on malnutrition in India and the relative success of the Public Distribution System (in terms of prices for the end-consumer and nutrition only – not in terms of efficiency). What caught my attention was the last chart – the one on per capita cereal consumption in rural and urban areas.

I wasn’t comfortable with the dynamic chart on the Mint website (they have a slightly better multiple-column chart in the paper this morning), so I redrew it using lines. I’m still not sure if drawing it using lines (since the X-axis is deciles which is ordered but strictly not numerical) is the most appropriate but haven’t been able to find a better way to draw it so here goes.

cerealconsumption

The Mint piece talks only about the ratio of consumption of top and bottom deciles in rural and urban areas and stop by saying that in urban areas the poorest consume more cereal than the richest. The “trends” in the above two lines tells me a different story, though.

As you see, as we go towards the right (i.e. richer people), consumption of cereal in urban areas (the red line) actually drops! I would put this down to greater health-consciousness among the richer people of urban areas who are cutting down on cereals (either voluntarily or following the discovery of a lifestyle disease such as diabetes or cholesterol).

The blue rural line doesn’t show the same effect though – in fact, the richer you get the more cereal you consume if you are in a rural area. It either means that rural people are immune to lifestyle diseases (unlikely), or their lifestyles means that they aren’t as affected by lifestyle diseases as urban people (rather more likely) or that their lifestyle diseases go undiagnosed (perhaps even more likely) or that they have no choice but to eat cereals (unlikely again) or non-cereal sources of nutrition are too expensive for even the rich in the rural areas because of which they just consume more cereal.

Nevertheless, the trend shown in this graph is extremely interesting, and definitely shows among other things the power of aggregation when it comes to analysing data!

27% and building narratives using numbers

Some numbers scare you. Some numbers look so unreasonably large that it seems daunting to you, infeasible even. Other numbers, when wrapped in the right kind of narrative, seem so unreasonably small that they sway you (the Rs. 32 per person per day poverty line comes to mind). Thus, when you are dealing with numbers that intuitively look very large or very small, it is important that you build the right narrative around them. Wrap them well so that it doesn’t scare or haunt people. As the old Mirinda Lime ad used to say, “zor ka jhatka.. dheere se lage..”.

So the number in the headline of this blog post is the proposed rate of the Goods and Service Tax. While it is the revenue-neutral amount that needs to be charge should excise and sales and other taxes go, the number looks stupendously large. The way this number was reported on the front pages of business newspapers this morning, it looks so large and out of whack that people might decide that it is better to not have a GST at all.

I’m not blaming the papers for this – they have reported what they’ve been told. It is a question of building narratives by the government. The government, and the GST sub-panel, has done a lousy job of communicating this number, and guiding how it needs to be reported in the media. It is almost as if the way the number was reported is an attempt to further delay the implementation of the GST.

The GST is too important a piece of legislation to be derailed by bad narratives. The government must make every attempt to build a narrative that shows the GST as being conducive to people and to businesses, to show how the transaction costs it reduces will result in better prices for both consumers and businesses, and why it makes lives better. Reporting numbers that look really large doesn’t help matters.

Also, the quant in me is disappointed to see one precise number being put out as the “revenue neutral rate”. Since different goods and services which are now being taxed at differential rates are going to be brought into this one umbrella rate, the real revenue neutral rate is actually a function of the mix of the contribution of each of these goods and services to the GDP. Given that in a dynamic economy these rates are constantly changing, reporting one revenue neutral rate simply doesn’t make sense. A range would be a better way of going about it.

Related to this, given that the revenue neutral rate is a function of mix of goods and services, and this mix will change over time, the assumptions and forecasts that need to be taken into account in the process of fixing the rate are important. The GST panel would do well to take into account the risk of product-and-service mix changing that can make all calculations go awry!

PS: If only they were to hire me as a consultant to this panel 😛

 

The Catalan Referendum

The results of the Catalan “informal referendum” are in, and show that over 80% of the respondents in the referendum have indicated a “Yes, Yes”, which means they want an independent Catalunyan nation. Of course, as pointed out here last weekend, this referendum doesn’t mean a thing, for there is significant selection bias in voting – for people in favour of secession would have had a much higher incentive to turn up on Sunday compared to those that were against.

So what does the Spanish PM Mariano Rajoy do now? Though this vote means nothing, one thing the “massive majority” does is to strengthen the case for the Catalans to press for a more formal referendum, one that is recognised by the Spanish Parliament. What this “massive majority” also does is to embolden the leaders of the Catalan independence movement towards becoming more hardline in their demands.

Spain can ill afford to lose Catalunya, for that is one part of the country whose economy isn’t as badly wrecked as that of the rest of the country. In fact, given complications in terms of membership of the EU, it may not actually be in Catalunya’s interest to be an independent nation – though that is another story. The best solution going forward would be what a referendum would have termed a “Yes, No”, that is to give Catalunya more autonomy as a “state” (right now it’s an “autonomous region”) within Spain.

Other regions of Spain such as the Basque Country have much more control over their finances than Catalunya does, and the Spanish government would do well to make such federalism uniform and give Catalunya similar powers. This would help maintain status quo over national identity, while conceding to the Catalans their biggest demand which is that too much of their tax money is going to fund the rest of Spain. Of course the rest of Spain will take a hit in terms of finances, but it can be worked out so that it is a gradual process and not sudden.

It is also worth examining the reasons behind the current wave of Catalan nationalism. There are two factors – firstly the Catalans resent that their tax money is being spent on the rest of Spain. When this combines with the fact that Catalunya is culturally different from the rest of Spain, and harbours an anger towards Madrid for what can be described as three centuries of “Castilian imperialism”, this leads to secessionist tendencies.

There are important lessons to be learnt from this for other countries which are also multicultural, and where one part (which represents a “different culture”) is significant superior to the other economically. There can be only one solution to keep such countries united – greater federalism, and to give the culturally-different-economically-superior regions belief that they are not being controlled by the “centre”. It is time for multicultural countries to embrace this rather than pretending to rule under the assumption that they are monocultural, and with an iron fist.

A One Year MBA Doesn’t Make Any Sense

Around this time last year, when the wife was applying for B-school, I was clear in my advice to her on one thing – that a one year MBA just doesn’t make sense. From what I recall I wasn’t really clear back then regarding that piece of advice – it was rather intuitive, and based on a few “data points” I know, but as I see her go through her (two year) MBA, I realise why my advice makes sense.

There are two important functions that a business school performs. The first – which is debatable since a lot of people I’ve spoken to, including my classmates from IIMB – is that it changes the fundamental way you think. Exposure to different paradigms of management and case studies and frameworks completely changes the way, in my opinion based on my tenure at IIMB, you think about a lot of things in the world. If I were to summarise my MBA in one sentence, I will say that it taught me, and reinforced in me, the issue of tradeoffs.

In corporate strategy we learnt that any strategy you adopt will have its pros and cons, and if a strategy helps you “cover one flank”, it will expose you to the other. In HR, we learnt that life, and all our decisions, are all about making tradeoffs. In finance, we learnt that the very concept of the interest rate reflects the tradeoff between consumption today and consumption tomorrow. And so forth.

This, and a few other concepts that I learnt in my two years at B-school, completely changed the way i look at a lot of things in the world, and that helped broaden my perspective and that alone makes me believe that the time I spent at B-school was time well spent (I managed to get a scholarship so I didn’t spend much money for my education there).

Coming back, the second function that a business school performs is that of an employment exchange. By having a highly selective admission process it signals its students’ quality to prospective employers, and helps people move ahead in their careers by getting jobs they would have otherwise not got, without the MBA. For a lot of people, this is the primary reason to go to B-school (let me confess that this was the case for me, too, 10 years back), and the learning or changing the way they think is a bonus. But having had ones way of thinking changed, one will realise that this change is the more sustainable impact that the B-school has on you.

So what does this have to do with one year MBAs? Ever since my wife started her classes two months ago, she has had to start preparing for summer internships. She worked on her CV, wrote cover letters, attended tonnes of PPTs and networking sessions, even did a short trip to network with some companies and so forth (it was a similar case for me 10 years back). In sum, she has spent a disproportionate amount of her time and energy in dealing with the placements, leaving little time and energy and mind space for her academics.

Now, the point is that this is only for a summer internship, which allows you to make a mistake since you are not permanently committing to a company. If you don’t like your internship, or if the company where you intern doesn’t like you, you always have a second chance during the so-called (in IIMB) “final placements” to make a better choice. Yet, despite knowing that the summer internship is not “final” and gives you a second chance, first year students of two-year MBAs everywhere end up getting quite stressed over it, with the stress not lifting until they know where they are going (which, for some curious reason both in India and abroad happens rather early – in the second “trimester”).

It is only when the summer placements are done are you actually able to concentrate and do justice to your academics, and do some learning, to try and imbibe the first function that a B-school offers. Then you can relax and concentrate on your studies till late in the second year when (if you haven’t “converted” your internship) you will need to find a full-time job. In IIMs, thankfully, this happens towards the very end of the course which gives you sufficient time to actually learn, change the way you think, or do whatever the hell you want.

Now think of what happens in a one-year MBA. Firstly, typically there is no internship, meaning you have only one chance to get your post-MBA “remodelled” career right. Secondly, since “final placements” are less than a year away, you will have to spend a considerable amount of your time and energy and mindspace in Business School to that end – worrying about it, wearing suits, attending PPTs, attending career fairs, networking and all such.

There is very little time that you spend in a one year MBA when you are actually relaxed and know where you are going next, which is a necessary condition for you to learn, and for the business school to “affect” you. And to change the way you think, which is the only lasting impression (apart from the brand) that the business school can have on you!

So unless you want an MBA just for the brand, and just for the change in career, a one year MBA makes absolutely no sense. It is cheaper, for sure (both in terms of time and money), but so much inferior in value, since the main function of a B-school has very little time to actually function!

Selection bias in Catalunya?

Catalunya, where I spent two weeks last month, votes today in an “informal referendum” on whether to secede from Spain. This vote is non-binding after the Spanish Supreme Court declared an earlier “official referendum” called by the Catalan government as illegal. As I write this (11 pm IST; 6:30 in Catalunya), FT reports that there were “long lines to vote” in the informal referendum today. The same report in the opening paragraph mentions “with an overwhelming majority expected to back a proposal to break away from the rest of the country and form an independent state“.

Looking at it from a pure numbers perspective, this outcome is not to be unexpected. Consider two hypothetical voters and Barcelona residents Jordi and Jorge (the more observant reader might observe that these names have been chosen carefully) who are respectively for and against the secession. What are their incentives to come out and vote today, as against in a “real referendum”?

As far as Jorge is concerned, today’s vote doesn’t matter to him. Given that today’s referendum is “informal”, which way it goes has, in Jorge’s opinion, absolutely no impact on his life. Thus, he will consider the time and energy he would have to expend in queueing up and voting today to be not worth it. And thus he will not bother. And get on with his life. If today’s referendum were “real”, though, Jorge would have every incentive to register his opposition in the hope that his vote would help tip the vote towards a “no”, and thus he would be voting.

What about Jordi? Even though Jordi knows that today’s vote is only “informal”, he wants to send out a statement that he is in favour of secession. The way he sees it, the larger the majority by which today’s vote will come out in support of secession, the stronger the message that will be sent to Madrid, which he hopes should sooner or later be forced to relent, and permit a real independence vote. As far as Jordi is concerned, today’s vote has tremendous signalling value, and to this end he has every incentive to expend his time and energy and queue up and vote!

Based on this more Jordis are likely to come out today to vote, while less Jorges are likely to do so. Which means that today’s vote, thanks to the selection bias of one side being much more disposed to vote than the other, is likely to throw up a skewed result! Thus, it makes sense to treat the results with some salt.

But what about higher order effects? It is not hard for Jordis and Jorges to see what I’ve written above. Knowledge of this is not likely to change Jordi’s stance – just “victory” in today’s referendum is not enough for him. He is using today’s vote to primarily make a statement and the larger the “majority” that can be shown in favour of a “Yes” vote, the better it is for him. So the second order effects will not affect Jordi.

What about Jorge? He understands that while his vote doesn’t really matter since today’s referendum is not real, he knows that most people in favour of the referendum are likely to be voting today. Thus, the referendum is going to show an inflated majority in favour of “Yes”. So should he vote today to balance things out? On the one hand the effort might be worth it in terms of reducing the majority for the “Yes” vote. But then again, Jorge will realise that the selection bias in today’s vote is very very apparent, and his effort in marginally reducing the majority in favour of “Yes” may not actually be worth it! And so he will not vote.

So it is clear that today’s vote will show a significant majority in favour of secession from Spain, but that this is likely to be vastly overstated and very different from what things would be like had today’s vote been real. In that sense, if Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy and his advisers are smart, and realise the selection bias that is inherent, they can render today’s “informal referendum” rather pointless.

Meeting types

There are essentially three kinds of meetings – those that are entirely “in person”, those that are entirely “on call” and hybrids. I argue that the quality of conversation in the third kind of meeting is significantly inferior to that of the first two types.

In person meetings are those where all participants are in one room. These are perhaps the best kind of meetings (except when you know it’s likely to turn antagonistic), for you can maintain eye contact with the others and as long as the number of meeters is small, there is social pressure on meeters to not be distracted, and thus the meeting is likely to conclude its agenda productively and quickly.

Conference calls allow you to multitask while you are on the meeting – the positive thing is that you can choose to switch off when you want to, but the downside of that is that you don’t know when one of the others is switching off, and this might take longer to conclude your agenda. However, the good thing about such meetings is that everyone is speaking into the phone, is well aware that it’s only voice that is getting transmitted and thus moderate their speaking accordingly.

The problem is with the hybrids – where some people are in one room and others are dialling in. Some of these meetings are not a problem – let’s say there are two parties that are party to the meeting, and all members of one party are in one location and all members of the other party in the other location, it is rather simple – you are much more likely to speak addressing the other party, and thus your voice and gestures are as if you’re on a conference call, and you speak more for the benefit of the counterparties at the other end of the line rather than your colleagues sitting with you in your room.

There are some meetings, however, where either you have way too many parties, or a particular party gets split between people physically present and people who are listening in. These meetings are the most disastrous and least likely to add value. I’ve been on both sides of such meetings – being in camera and dialling in, and have got immensely stressed out on both such occasions.

The problem with such meetings is that you’re not clear who you are addressing. Let’s say you are in camera. If you speak addressing the people sitting with you, you are likely to use a lot of body-part gestures to enhance your message, and speak in a voice that is appropriate for the room. Neither of this translates well over the phone – for people who have dialled in, neither will the voice be clear nor will they get the full import of the talking since they can’t see the hand gestures! And so they feel left out and are compelled to switch off.

On the other hand, if you are in camera and decide to speak addressing primarily the people who have dialled in, others in your room will get disturbed and switch off. You will tend to speak too loudly, for you desire to speak into the speakerphone, and given you are primarily address people who can’t see you, you don’t bother with niceties such as using your body parts for gesturing or maintaining eye contact with anyone. Thus, people in your room will get alienated and switch off!

It is the same case when you are dialling in. Firstly you don’t know when to intervene, for you miss possible visual cues that the others are using to communicate subliminally. When you do intervene you don’t know if you can be heard, and the other participants who would have by now been used to giving physical feedback – like eye contact or a nod or a smile or a wink, fail to give you the verbal feedback that you now desire! And while listening you get alienated as I’ve explained earlier.

A meeting where some people are in camera and some dialling in does no good for anybody. It is hence preferable to avoid such meetings. However, there are some occasions when for some desired participants it is not possible to be physically present. A good solution for such occasions would be to march the other attendees back to their offices and do the whole thing over call. It is definitely less stressful than a half-and-half hybrid meeting!

My first ever published piece of writing

So the first time ever I published something was in 2003, in The Fourth Estate, IIT Madras’s campus magazine. It was a rather scandalous piece. So scandalous that I declined to put my real name as the byline instead preferring to be called “The Wimp”.

I was rummaging through my computer and actually managed to find a soft copy of that issue of The Fourth Estate. I have no clue where I had downloaded it. In any case if any of you is interested, do let me know and I’ll send over the PDF to you. Anyway, here goes the piece. Copypasting from PDF, so might be some formatting issues. I’ve quoted the whole thing verbatim

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