Author: SK

Clusters, not champions

Recently, Nokia decided to shut its factory in Sriperumbudur, following a tax dispute with the Indian government and the loss of orders from Microsoft, who took over most of Nokia’s cellphone business (in fact, all of it apart from the Sriperumbudur factory). Consequently, it has had to let go of most of its workers in its plant. The results, as Mint has reported here, are not pretty at all. People who worked for years at Nokia assembling phones have suddenly found that in the absence of Nokia, there is no comparable employer in the Sriperumbudur area. There is little else in terms of mobile phone manufacturing in India – most Indian companies get their phones manufactured abroad. Only this April did MicroMax start manufacturing phones in India – in Rudraprayag, far far away from Sriperumbudur.

Around the same time that Nokia was shutting down its factory in Sriperumbudur, Yahoo! decided to shut down its software engineering operations in Bangalore. About 600 employees got sacked (with severance payouts), while a few top performers were given the option of either relocating to its California headquarters or exiting the company with an even better severance payout. In the days that have followed, there has been a massive scramble for the now ex Yahoos among software companies in India. Apart from those that are yet to make up their mind, most ex Yahoos are gainfully employed, most of them in Bangalore.

The reason for the differential outcomes in the above two cases has to do with geography. Nokia’s plant in Sriperumbudur operated in an island – in a place where there was little else in the way of mobile manufacturing units. Thus, employees of the plant (who were well paid, as per the report), came to depend wholly on Nokia for their livelihoods. It something happened to Nokia, as it did, or if for some reason their relationship with their employer or boss soured, they had nowhere to go. Even when the plant was fully functional and successful, employees of the plant were effectively “locked in” to their employers and thus had little choice in terms of their careers.

Yahoo!, on the other hand, had (and has; operations have not ceased yet) its office in Bangalore, which has emerged as an excellent hub for software engineering services in India. From the time Texas Instruments first set up its office in the city over thirty years back (apart from the weather, a guiding factor for that decision was the availability of engineering talent in Bangalore, thanks to the presence of defence PSUs in the city), Bangalore has only grown as a market for techies. Thus, there is a large number of IT companies that has made Bangalore its home, and there is now a significant market for techies of all levels and skills in the city. Thus, when Yahoo! decided to shut its factory, there was little problem in absorbing the now surplus employees.

The difference between Sriperumbudur and Bangalore was that Bangalore grew organically as an IT hub – companies invested in the city because it made economic sense for them to invest there, in terms of the ecosystem, and upward and downward linkages available in the city. Nokia, on the other hand, was “parachuted” into Sriperumbudur. The Mint story mentions that the Nokia factory was situated there after some kind of a bidding war between various states, and was essentially a political decision and not a business decision made by Nokia. Nokia was followed there by its suppliers (who are also facing an uncertain future now) but that was the end of it – there was no further growth in the mobile manufacturing ecosystem in the Sriperumbudur area. Thus when the one company that the tiny ecosystem there got dependent on decided to shut shop, the consequences were disastrous.

There are several policy lessons that can be drawn out of the above contrast. The first, and most important, lesson is that companies should not be “parachuted” into areas chosen by the government (Jane Jacobs has an excellent treatment of this in her book Cities and the Wealth of Nations). Instead, investment should happen “organically”, by means of decisions that make business sense to the investor without relying on artificial sweeteners such as tax breaks (this might mean that no investment might happen in certain areas, but that only means that such areas are overpopulated and people from there should move to areas where investment happens).

As a corollary of the above lessons, we need land acquisition laws that are friendly to both investors and landowners – the current law passed last year is friendly to neither, but simply enhances the power of the government. The key to the building of large industrial clusters (especially in heavy manufacturing industries that the current government plans to promote) is that companies will want to be situated close to other similar companies, or companies that form an upward or downward linkage. This means the company should have the ability to set up shop close to the existing cluster, and that means being able to purchase the land at a “reasonable” (both to the company and the land owner) price. A land acquisition law which empowers the government at the cost of the transacting parties prevents such organic expansion from taking place.

Thirdly, governments should stop promoting “champions”. The assumption is that once you have a “champion” of a particular sector set up shop in a particular area, it will automatically lead to an ecosystem for that sector in the area. As the Nokia story demonstrates, this is not necessarily the case. What the government should do is instead simply be an enabler for clusters, and stop looking for “champions” to establish such clusters. In fact, it is not necessary for a big investment by an existing company for a cluster to develop, and this needs to be recognised.

Conventional wisdom regarding the success of the software engineering industry in India is that it succeeded “in spite of” rather than “because of” the government – being a new sector it was lightly regulated that resulted in its rapid growth and success. While the contribution of the government in the overall success of the industry might be debated, what is clear is that lack of government intervention has helped the industry to build around a few “clusters”, and that has only made the industry stronger.

Rodgers and the Ranatunga Principle

It was a wonderful display of the “Ranatunga Principle” by Brendan Rodgers last night, when he fielded what was effectively a second string Liverpool team at Real Madrid. That they lost only 1-0 shows that it wasn’t that bad a ploy, especially given the more important features coming up ahead.

Firstly, Liverpool have not given up on the Champions League. They have simply prioritised. The group they are is a rather weird one – where one team is significantly superior to the others which are approximately at the same level. It is not inconceivable at all that Real Madrid will win all their six games and get 18 points.

Before the game at Anfield two weeks back the degree of Real Madrid’s superiority over Liverpool wasn’t yet fully established and Rodgers smelt the chances of handing out an upset at home and fielded his strongest team. It backfired spectacularly as Real Madrid hammered Liverpool. The more important result of the night, though, was the unfancied but promising Ludogorets beating Basel at home. It was that result that allowed Rodgers to do what he did yesterday.

Real Madrid’s dominance means that Liverpool, Basel and Ludogorets are effectively playing a 3-team mini league the winner of which will go through to the knockouts (of course the extents of their respective thrashings by Real Madrid will matter if it comes down to goal difference). So far, in this mini group, all games have gone to the “home team”.

Liverpool’s last two games of the season see them take on Basel at home and Ludogorets away, and if they win both of them, they are through to the knockouts. Even if Liverpool had come away with a point in last night’s game, this equation would not have changed significantly (three points last night would have helped but the game at Anfield showed how impossible that was).

Liverpool have had a rather busy fixture list in the last 3 weeks. In the space of three weeks they’ve had to play QPR, Real Madrid, Hull, Swansea, Newcastle, Real Madrid and Chelsea – not an easy fixture list at all, and Liverpool’s poor form in the league has made them take even the Capital One Cup seriously, meaning not too many players could be rotated for the game against Swansea. In the loss to Newcastle on Saturday, the fatigue was evident as Liverpool’s attackers were all anonymous. A rest day was thus in order.

This, combined with the weird nature of the Champions League group that Liverpool are in meant that last night’s game was the “least important” for Liverpool in the current run of fixtures, which permitted them to rest key players and give a run out to the perennial subs. And on the evidence of the 1-0 defeat, it seems it didn’t go too badly. Now if only Liverpool can make use of this rest and beat Chelsea on the weekend!

Postscript

Gerrard came on around three-quarters into last night’s game. I have come to believe that is his best position for the team now. Come on as an “impact substitute” in the second half and play in the “old Gerrard role”.

Black Money: Stocks and flows

Any physical quantity can be measured in two ways – as a “stock” and as a “flow”. Stock refers to the total amount of the quantity at a particular location at a particular time. Think, for example, of water in a reservoir. “The stock of water at XXX reservoir is 1000 cubic metres” is a “stock measurement” –  it tells us how much water was there at a particular point in time.

The other way of measurement is as a “flow”. This refers to the quantity of the quantity that “changes” or “passes through” between two fixed points in time. For example, we can say that “the flow of the water in my bathroom tap is 20 litres per minute” or “in the last one hour 100 litres of water flowed down my drainage pipe”. Dimensionally speaking, flow has a “quantity per time” dimension while stock has a “quantity” dimension. Flow, unless expressed as a rate of change, also has two points in time mentioned while stock is measured at a single point in time.

Moving from physical quantities (such as water) to financial matters, a company’s balance sheet is the measurement of stock, since it measures the assets and liabilities at a particular point in time (“as of 31st March 2014”). The profit and loss statement, on the other hand, is a measurement of flow, since it tells us about the revenues, costs and profits of the firm in a particular time period (“between 1st April 2013 and 31st March 2014”, for example).

Taking matters more global, any measurement of wealth is a stock, since it is measured at a particular point in time. Measurement of economic activity, such as GDP, on the other hand, is a flow, since it measures the quantity of activity over a period of time. A common fallacy is to compare stocks to flows (this piece in ET is a stellar example of this fallacy), though it must be mentioned that it’s a common practice in financial accounting, analysis and valuation (but there the dimensionality is maintained and recognised. It is common, for example, to divide inventory (a stock) by sales (a flow) to determine “how many days of inventory” a company has on hand). More worryingly, there is sometimes a worrying lack of understanding between stocks and flows when it comes to policy recommendations.

One of the features of the BJP’s campaign over the years, and especially in its run up to this year’s General Elections, is to “bring back black money stored abroad”.

Pop Quiz: Is black money stored abroad a stock or a flow?

During the duration of this “bring back black money” campaign, there have been many fanciful estimates of the amount of black money stashed away abroad and what that can do to India’s deficits if it can be “brought back”. Some of the WhastApp and email forwards estimate, extremely fancifully, what the bringing back of the black money can do to the USD/INR exchange rate even!

The problem with this whole idea of “bringing back black money abroad” is that it fundamentally attacks a particular stock of black money and not the flow (there you have the answer to the pop quiz). Black money stashed away abroad is “harmless” in that it just sits there without being used for any transaction. In that sense the value of that money is lower since it is not being constantly exchanged for something that is more valuable.

What should be of more of a concern to us is the “flow” of black money rather than the stock. Every time a transaction is financed by black money (i.e. without a paper trail or a receipt, and money changing hands in hard cash), the government loses out on the taxes that would have otherwise have to be paid on the transaction. The more the number and value of transactions that can be conduced “in black”, the more the incentive for people to do other transactions “in black” and keep their money in cash, and not accounted for. This has a multiplier effect in terms of number and value of transactions that are unaccounted, and thus help evade taxes.

Rather than one-time efforts to “bring back black money” which attack only the stock of black money, our policy should be geared towards cutting down the flow of black money. A regime of high stamp duties and low property taxes, for example, lead to the perverse incentive for under-invoicing the price of real estate and paying the difference in cash – the “saving” is such that even otherwise law-abiding citizens have an incentive to play along in the black money game and trade in cash. Enabling easier peer-to-peer mobile payments, for example, can have the effect of dramatically increasing the number of transactions that can be conducted without cash, and will be an important step in chipping away at flows of black money. Value Added Tax, with its “input credits” was designed as a system to check under-invoicing within a supply chain, but what if the entire supply chain of a particular commodity runs on cash without written contracts (social capital within business communities allows this, for example)?

Periodic attacks on the stocks of black money (stored either abroad or domestically) can bring in large amounts of money into government coffers and this might make such attacks glamorous. But they are tedious to implement and government resources are much better off employed in cutting off the flows of black money.

Doctors and correlation-causation

One of the common cribs about the medical profession is that most doctors don’t have enough grounding in mathematics and statistics (subjects they typically don’t study beyond high school). Given the role of mathematics and statistics in medicine, in terms of gathering evidence, medical testing, etc. the lack of mathematical or statistical knowledge can have serious consequences in terms of interpretation of techniques and symptoms and all that.

In the field of statistics we have this adage that goes that we should “treat the disease and not the symptom”. This is no less true in the medical profession – let’s say that you have a bacterial infection which causes a fever, a poor doctor would diagnose your fever by taking your temperature, assume that it is the fever thanks to which you are sick and give you medication to lower the fever without realising that there is a “third variable” that might be causing both – your fever and your sickness. Thus, your fever might come down and consequently your sickness but both would presently appear.

I’ve had chronic pain in my heels for a few months now. It’s especially severe whenever I put my feet on the ground from a raised position. Someone had told me that it occurs due to calcification near the Achilles Tendon, and I must take medication for that. Having pushed it for a few months now I finally went to see my uncle who is an orthopaedic yesterday (this is the same guy who told me about my Boxer’s Fist).

He promptly diagnosed me with Plantar Fasciitis, and wrote down some medication, and told me what I need to do in order to reduce the pain in my feet. After a short conversation on what else I need to do, and any precautions, and all such, I asked him about the calcification thingy – whether he had ruled out that calcification of the Achilles Tendon was causing this problem.

“I’m sure there will be some calcification”, he said, “and I’m not sending you for an X-ray because I have a very good idea of what it will show and it won’t add much value”. And then he proceeded to explain that calcification is a “result” of plantar fasciitis and not a cause of it. He didn’t use the terms “correlation” or “causation” but he explained that when you suffer from plantar fasciitis you end up with both calcification of your Achilles Tendon and also shooting pain in your heels, especially immediately after waking up. The two are thus related, he said, but neither causes the other, but there is a third factor (fasciitis) that causes both, and that is the one that he is treating me for!

I was doubly impressed with him – first for understanding “information theory” in terms of understanding that the X-ray wouldn’t add much information, and secondly for recognising that there was a third factor and that correlation should not be mistaken for causation. Or perhaps I had a particularly low prior for mathematical and statistical skills of doctors!

Postscript

He refused to charge me a fee, since I’m his nephew. While on my way out I was thinking about it and wondering on what circumstances I would waive my professional fees for my consulting. And I realised it would be hard to do so for anyone! It made me wonder what made my uncle waive his medical fees, while I’m extremely unlikely to do that.

I realised it has to do with the investment. He spent about five to ten minutes with me (perhaps a bit longer), but essentially his marginal cost of treating me was quite low. And this was a marginal cost that he was willing to sacrifice in return for the goodwill he gets for treating the extended family for free. Considering the size of my engagements, though, the marginal cost is usually high and is seldom justified by goodwill!

Me in Pragati on Civil Wars

Last week I wrote an essay in Takshashila Institution’s Pragati where I argued that Civil Wars don’t have a “good side”.

An excerpt:

Thanks to the efforts of individuals such as Pablo Picasso and George Orwell among others, the Spanish Civil War is often portrayed as a conflict between the ‘good’ (the socialist Republic) and the ‘bad’ (the Nationalist forces) – with the malicious Nationalists bombing the poor Republican people. The truth, however, is not so simple. Looking at other, more objective accounts, including Lowe’s, it turns out that it was a war fought between two evil sides (though it’s not clear if the sides were equally evil) – the Nationalists on one side and the Communists on the other, with the people of Spain being the real victims.

Extended Munroe Protocol

Last Monday three of us were drinking beer at Arbor. One of us got up for a bathroom break. Like a pack of dogs, or a classroom of coughing students, the other two took the cue within a couple of seconds. And we trudged in a line to the bathroom.

The thing with Arbor is that it might be very crowded and very loud on weekends, but on rainy Monday evenings it’s remarkably empty and quiet (the music was very pleasant there, for the first time when I’ve been there). A consequence of this is that there are very few people in the bathroom at any given point of time. And last Monday, when the first of us (it wasn’t me) entered the bathroom it was absolutely empty (I was about to say “when we entered the bathroom”, but since we were walking in a line and not abreast, the bathroom wouldn’t have been empty when the second of us entered! (it’s an old Tenali Rama story that was once published in Tinkle) ).

The urinal at Arbor has five stalls, and the first guy who entered took the stall at one corner (let’s call it 1). The second guy (again not me, things are coming back to mind now) took the stall at the other corner (number 5). I go in, and see that it makes most logical sense for me to take 3, and I go. At almost the same instant, the other two guys shout “Munroe Protocol“.

Without realising it, or maybe those guys did but I surely didn’t, we had followed the Munroe protocol precisely. First guy took one corner, second took the other corner and third took the farthest away from both. As perfect as it gets. One of the benefits of the discussion that followed was that I got acquainted with the Munroe Protocol (I was aware of the protocol but not the name). And since then it’s been embedded in my head.

On Saturday at the Landmark Quiz, I went for a leak between the time the prelims finished and the answers were to be given. Again, since the answers were yet to be given, most people were in their seats, and the toilet was not too full. I approached a line of five stalls (this was a big bathroom) and found people in positions 2 and 4. “Bastards”, I thought, thinking about their utter disregard of the Munroe Protocol, and took my stand at the now uncomfortable stall 3.

As I was doing my business it occurred to my mind that the clown to the left of me and the joker to my right may not have been so evil after all. They might have been occupying stalls 2 and 4 despite following the Munroe Protocol, and for no fault of theirs. This leads us to the Extended Munroe Protocol, which can follow as an extension of the Munroe Protocol.

So here is how it could have happened. Let’s assume that people take a constant amount of time to pee. Let’s assume that the bathroom has precisely five stalls, numbered 1 to 5. First guy enters and takes 1 (as per the Munroe Protocol). Second guy takes 5. Third guy takes 3. All going well according to the protocol.

Now the fourth guy enters. What does he do? If he is of the extremely decent types, he will wait for one of the three (most likely 1, given our assumption) to finish and take his place. But most people are not that way, and so the fourth guy is likely to take one of the two empty stalls. Without loss of generality, let’s say he takes 2. The fifth guy now enters and seeing only one stall (4) empty, takes that. We have a full house now.

Let’s assume that it’s a while before the sixth guy enters. In the meantime, the first guy finishes his business, and exits stage left. The second guy (position 5) follows him soon, and he is then followed by the third guy (position 3). And at this precise moment the sixth guy enters. And what does he see?

Positions 2 and 4 taken in a five-stall urinal. “Bastards”, he thinks, without realising that this setup came about via diligent practice of the Munroe Protocol.

Neal Stephenson is Amibah the Formless One

Close to ten years ago, some of us had imagined ourselves to be Gods, and thus created a Pantheon. I was War, for whatever reason. Madness was Madness. Kodhi was Disease. Spunky was Death, because, you know, Death looks like Spunky.

And then there was a whole host of “minor Gods”, most of who I don’t remember right now, but most of who were also modelled after real people that we (Madness, Disease and I – the creators of the Pantheon) were very well acquainted with. If I’m not wrong, there was a point in time when we tried fitting every significant person around us into the Pantheon. Anyway.

So as far as Pantheons are concerned a flat organisation is not desirable. There can be minor quibbles among the Gods, which can only be resolved by a higher power. Then, there can be conflicts in judgments of Gods, for which a hierarchy is necessary to determine whose Will will prevail.

One way of doing this is to establish a hierarchical structure, where there is some kind of well-formed ordering among the Gods of the Pantheon. The downside of this, of course, is that there can be quibbles among the Gods regarding their positions in the Pantheon itself, and if they can’t agree on the hierarchy itself, there is very little they can achieve by being Gods.

So a standard solution for this is to have a mostly flat organisational structure, but have a head at the head of it – a King of Gods, or perhaps a God of Gods. So in Indian mythology you have Indra. The Greeks have Zeus, whom the Romans call Jupiter and whom the Norse call Thor (it is interesting, though, that when it comes to days of the week, it is Brhaspati and not Indra who is mapped to Jupiter and Thor. But that is another matter). Given that most of the Pantheonic religions have a King of Gods, it seems like a rather sustainable organisational structure!

And so we decided to have a King of Gods for our Pantheon also. Now, within our peer group we wanted to avoid unsavoury competition, and didn’t want to impose a hierarchy. So we had to get someone from outside the peer group to head the Pantheon (like the Kodhis have Manoj Kumar at the head of their Pantheon). So we created a King of Gods, and called him/her (it wasn’t clear then) Amibah the Formless One. Amibah wasn’t mapped to anyone we knew.

So as I’d mentioned in these pages last month, I recently finished reading Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon. Earlier in October, two days before I was due a day-long flight, I started reading the prequel to that, The Baroque Cycle (this book is so long that at the end of the flight, most of which I spent reading, I was at 6% in the book). I’m now through about a quarter of the book, and it has been absolutely awesome. I’ve learnt much more about late Medieval European history by reading this book than by reading all the other history books I’ve read in the last several years.

That, however, is besides the point. As I have been going through the two books of Stephenson, I’m amazed at how much of Madness’s talking and writing and style is derived from Stephenson. In almost every page, there is something that I read that reminds me of Madness. The similarity in styles is unmistakable. Considering that Madness had finished reading the two books before he wrote all the stuff in which the same style was seen, the causation can only run one way – everything Madness says and does is heavily influenced by Stephenson’s writings.

Madness channels Stephenson in everything that he writes, says and does. If you were to remove the elements of Stephenson from Madness, he gets reduced to virtually nothing. By thus channeling Stephenson, Madness can be considered an ambassador of Stephenson. Nay, he should be considered to be a Prophet of Stephenson.

So if Madness is a Prophet of Stephenson, that implies that Stephenson is a God. But Madness is no ordinary prophet – he is also a member of the Pantheon. That a member of the Pantheon is Stephenson’s prophet can mean only one thing – that Stephenson is a higher member of the Pantheon. Which means he is none other than the King of Gods.

Which means that Neal Stephenson is actually Amibah the Formless ONe.

Meeting your husband’s old crush

I wonder what it’s like to meet your husband’s old crush. Someone who you know he was quite obsessed with back in the day, when he did all sorts of crazy things because his crush was hardly materialising, in honour of whose stillborn love he wrote short stories (something he has never ever done for you), and someone who he is still good friends with even a decade after his crush ended.

I wonder what it’s like to be in a new city, where you’ve only been for four days, and then venturing out to an unknown part of town to meet someone who you’ve never met before, who you’ve never even spoken to, and about whom you know only because of reading your husband’s blogs about her, and because of what your husband has told you about her.

I wonder if it feels weird, or if it is just a part of the game, that you are going to travel two hours to meet someone whose only connection to you is your husband, who is not going to be there with you when you meet her. He has made that introduction, told both of you perhaps more than you need to know about each other, but now he’s throwing both of you into the deep end, asking you to meet, to hang out, to make conversation. Is he asking too much of both of you?

What are you even going to talk about? Your husband, who both of you know very well, is one obvious topic, but what about that signboard in Bishop Cottons Boys’ School (that your husband told you about) that said “great mind discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people” (or some variation of that)? There is the professional stuff that you guys can talk about, which you perhaps would even prefer, but would you want to spend most of your time on your first meeting with someone you are likely to get along with, just talking about work? Then again, it helps immensely that both of you are outgoing and extroverted and generally good conversationalists, people who are inherently good at putting the counterparty at ease. But with two of you being of the same “type”, will there be a clash?

If not anything else, one good thing that will come out of this meeting is that your husband (evil guy he is) is going to call up both of you after you’re done with each other, and find out “how it went”. If not anything else, there will be value added in terms of some entertainment for him, as he will speak to the two of you and try and elicit gossip after you’re done meeting. As far as the universe is concerned, the cost that the two of you will have to pay in terms of possible discomfort and awkwardness will be offset by the value that your husband will gain by means of “entertainment value”. And then there is the option value of the two of you actually getting along and having a good time together!

So for the universe, it works out. For you and for your husband’s old crush, it may lead to negative value. But then such deals are precisely the kind of stuff that your evil ex-banker husband is good at structuring!

Rossetta Stoning Catalan Names

On my penultimate day in Barcelona, I finally figured out how to identify Catalan names, and the equivalents of popular Catalan names in other languages. I did this by a process that I describe as “Rossetta Stoning”.

As you might already know by now, the way James Prinsep deciphered the hieroglyphic script was finding this stone inscription (now known as the “Rossetta Stone”) which had essentially the same text in both hieroglyphic ancient greek (the latter language was known and understood). By comparing the two texts, Prinsep could develop a one-to-one mapping between them and thus decipher the unknown text.

In Barcelona I lived close to “Avinguda de Josep Taradellas”. Now, it is well known that the Spanish form of “Joseph” is “Jose”, so where did Josep come from? Sid Lowe’s book, which I partly read on my way to Barcelona and finished in Barcelona, mentioned that Taradellas was a Catalan politician who got exiled during and after the Spanish Civil War. Lowe talks about Taradellas’s return in 1976, and compared it with Pep Guardiola holding the European Cup at the same venue as Taradellas’s “return rally” (Placa Sant Jaume) a couple of decades later. So that established that Josep is likely to be the Catalan version of Joseph (Pep Guardiola’s real first name is also Josep). But more mapping was needed.

What was this “Pau” that I saw in several names in Barcelona? And was “Joan” definitely Catalan? All these questions were answered when I visited the Barcelona Cathedral, dedicated to the virgin Saint Eulalia, in the middle of the Gotico district of Barcelona. It is an absolutely beautiful and breathtaking cathedral, built in French Gothic style, and done up really well on the inside. And it is free to enter, as long as you don’t go around a service time (in which case you can’t enter at all).

The Barcelona Cathedral reminded me of Hindu temples, where there is the main deity in the middle of the temple, and then you have a number of “subordinate deities” and statues of other gods and goddesses arranged all round the temple. You are supposed to go around it clockwise, paying your respects to all these “peripheral” (in a physical sense) deities before you come round to worship the main deity in the middle.

The Barcelona Cathedral is somewhat similar – there is the crucifix in the middle (below which is the crypt of St. Eulalia) and then there are statues and paintings of various Christian Saints all round. Some of the paintings are really well done, and well preserved. It was a treat going around the Cathedral (I did it clockwise, like you are supposed to do in Hindu temples, though I found several people doing it anti-clockwise – maybe because they drive on the right side of the road in Barcelona). And accompanying each little “garbhagudi” (can’t find a better word  to describe those) was a little sign board indicating the saint whose pictures or statues were there.

And this was the Rossetta Stone that I was looking for, to map Catalan names to Spanish names. All boards were in both Catalan and Spanish, and some were in English, too. This allowed one to build a complete one-to-one mapping of the names.

And so I found that:

  • Josep = Jose = Joseph
  • Pau = Pablo = Paul
  • Pere = Pedro = Peter
  • Joan = Juan = John

And of course, Jordi = Jorge = George.

(in Catalan, btw, J is pronounced as J, and not as H like it is in Spanish).

I know it is a roundabout way to figure out some basic aspects of a country’s culture, but this is only a trivial instance I’m quoting here. Three and a half years back, touring Greece, I managed to learn to read Greek signboards by “Rossetta Stoning” them with comparable English signboards (it helped, of course, that I was familiar with the Greek alphabet thanks to their extensive use in mathematics).

And so I found out that “tau” is used for the hard T sound (as in Tank) while “theta” is used for the “tHa” (as in Thomas, or ratHa) sound (there are no other related t sounds, so Karthik can’t be written accurately in Greek). I also found out that Eta (H) is used to represent the long i sound (as in cheese) while iota (I) is used to represent the short i sound. And so forth.

But there is one constraint to this process – you need to know the script. It helped immensely that both Spanish and Catalan are written in Roman, and that the Greek script is quite popular. When I went to Thailand or Sri Lanka, for example, I didn’t figure out anything at all from their scripts. Or maybe I didn’t try hard enough!

Data Science is a Creative Profession

About a month or so back I had a long telephonic conversation with this guy who runs an offshored analytics/data science company in Bangalore. Like most other companies that are being built in the field of analytics, this follows the software services model – a large team in an offshored location, providing long-term standardised data science solutions to a client in a different “geography”.

As is usual with conversations like this one, we talked about our respective areas of work and kind of projects we take on, and soon we got to the usual bit in such conversations where we were trying to “find synergies”. Things were going swimmingly when this guy remarked that it was the first time he was coming across a freelancer in this profession. “I’ve heard of freelance designers and writers, but never freelance data scientists or analytics professionals”, he mentioned.

In a separate event I was talking to one old friend about another old friend who has set up a one-man company to do provide what is basically freelance consulting services. We reasoned that the reason this guy had set up a company rather than calling himself a freelancer given the reputation that “freelancers” (irrespective of the work they do) have – if you say you are a freelancer people think of someone smoking pot and working in a coffee shop on a Mac. If you say you are a partner or founder of a company, people imagine someone more corporate.

Now that the digression is out of the way let us get back to my conversation with the guy who runs the offshored shop. During the conversation I didn’t say much, just saying things like “what is wrong with being a freelancer in this profession”. But now that i think more about it, it is simply a function of the profession being a fundamentally creative profession.

For a large number of people, data science is simply about statistics, or “machine learning” or predictive modelling – it is about being given a problem expressed in statistical terms and finding the best possible model and model parameters for it. It is about being given a statistical problem and finding a statistical solution – I’m not saying, of course, that statistical modelling is not a creative profession – there is a fair bit of creativity involved in figuring out what kind of model to model, and picking the right model for the right data. But when you have a large team working on the problem, working effectively like an assembly line (with different people handling different parts of the solution), what you get is effectively an “assembly line solution”.

Coming back, let us look at this “a day in the life” post I wrote about a year back about a particular day in office for me. I’ve detailed in that the various kinds of problems I had to solve that day – hidden markov models and bayesian probability to writing code using dynamic programming and implementing the code in R, and then translating the solution back to the business context. Notice that when I started off working on the problem it was not known what domain the problem belonged in – it took some poking and prodding around in order to figure out the nature of the problem and the first step in solution.

And then on, it was one step leading to another, and there are two important facts to consider about each step – firstly, at each step, it wasn’t clear as to what the best class of technique was to get beyond the step – it was about exploration in order to figure out the best class of technique. Next, at no point in time was it known what the next step was going to be until the current step was solved. You can see that it is hard to do it in an assembly line fashion!

Now, you can talk about it being like a game of chess where you aren’t sure what the opponent will do, but then in chess the opponent is a rational human being, while here the “opponent” is basically the data and the patterns it shows, and there is no way to know until you try something as to how the data will react to that. So it is impossible to list out all steps beforehand and solve it – solution is an exploratory process.

And since solving a “data science problem” (as I define it, of course) is an exploratory, and thus creative, process, it is important to work in an atmosphere that fosters creativity and “thinking without thinking” (basically keep a problem in the back of your mind and then take your mind off it, and distract yourself to solve the problem). This is best done away from a traditional corporate environment – where you have to attend meetings and be liable to be disturbed by colleagues at all times, and this is why a freelance model is actually ideal! A small partnership also works – while you might find it hard to “assembly line” the problem, having someone to bounce thoughts and ideas with can have a positive impact to the creative process. Anything more like a corporate structure and you are removing the conditions necessary to foster creativity, and are in such situations more likely to come up with cookie-cutter solutions.

So unless your business model deals with doing repeatable and continuous analytical work for a client, you are better off organising yourselves in an environment that fosters creativity and not a traditional office kind of structure if you want to solve problems using data science. Then again, your mileage might vary!