Author: SK

Not much seems to have gone right for the Indian Cricket League since the idea was floated. Firstly it was announced that the ICL players wouldn’t be allowed to play first class cricket, which meant that they weren’t really able to attract good players. Then, there was the problem with the grounds, with state associations refusing to let their grounds out for ICL use. Then, some players who had signed backed out (Yousuf, LR Shukla) and went back to their host associations. Then there was the problem with the timing of the tournament given the Indian national team’s hectic schedule. And last but not the least, really badly designed uniforms.

Finally, a good eight months after the concept was floated, the ICL teams have been announced. And for a change, something seems to be going right for Subhash Chandra and his team. It looks like there has been some method to the madness by which players got recruited. When players started signing up for the ICL left right and center, it seemed as though they were poaching any tom, dick and harry. Now, it looks like there was some kind of system to the poaching. Has to do something with the geography.

The main thing that the ICL has done right is to have concentrated on a few ranji teams and poached wholesale from them. If you managed to read cricinfo’s preview of the current Ranji season, where they profiled each team, a state was either unaffected by the ICL or heavily affected. By poaching wholesale from one state team, what the ICL has managed is to have a geographically identified core group around which a team could be built.

Teams like Kolkota Tigers and Hyderabad Heroes have had it easy, given the number of guys from Bengal and Hyderabad and Andhra who switched over into the ICL. And these guys have formed the core of these teams. Similarly, the Madras and Chandigarh team have benefited from “mass migration”. Yes, the Delhi and Mumbai teams look fairly motley? – but that has been mainly because they haven’t been drawn mainly from single sources as other teams. However, on the whole, the ICL seems to have done a far better job of player distribution amongst teams when compared to the only other similar exercise – the premier hockey league, where players were fairly randomly distributed among the franchises giving each team little geographic identity.

The way most of these teams have been configured (ok i’m really stretching it here) reminds me of one article I had read in the ToI some 3 years back about the Milan team of the 1980s. That was the time when football teams had just started recruiting foreign players in big numbers. Milan had recruited the three Dutch stalwarts – Gullit, van Basten and Rijkaard. And the rest of the team was made up of local homegrown academy players. Thus, they managed to retain their traditional fan base while bringing in foreigners. The ToI article had gone on to say that the lack of local talent led to a massive erosion of support for Real Madrid during the galacticos era.

Similarly, here, the local guys in each team have been backed up by either retired or fringe international players. The team of coaches also looks quite good. The ICL had initially mentioned that each team would have about six local young talents. The number of unknown names in each list makes me believe they are actually sticking to that. It would be a great experience for these youngsters to be playing alongside the likes of Lara and Inzy and Cairns, and some might even grow up to be good enough for the BCCI to recognize the ICL and bring them to the mainstream.

Of course, challenges still remain. Zee Sports, where it will be telecast, reaches few homes. Demand won’t be strong enough for cable operators to take out one of the big sports channels and provide Zee sports. Tata SKY doesn’t offer the channel. That leaves just the Zee-controlled Dish TV system, not a huge audience. The matches themselves will be played in some nondescript stadium in Panchkula in Haryana. It is close to Chandigarh but I’m not sure about the crowds. Then, it is doubtful if the rest of the mainstream media will even cover these matches. That might have a huge bearing on the effect of the ICL. ???

Of late, Greg Mankiw has been trying hard to show that the US life expectancy is not as high as it should be because of a large number of “unnatural” deaths such as homicides, accidents, etc. Through this he tries to make a point that the healthcare system in the US is just fine, and it doesn’t need to be nationalized, as has been done in Canada and the UK. In this regard, today he publishes a table with “normalized” expectancies, where the effect of unnatural deaths is taken out.

I’m no expert in this but I have a hunch that the quality of life and healthcare in your childhood, growth, lifestyle, etc. have a much higher impact on expectancy than the kind of healthcare available in the latter stages of your life. So assume that by now (i’m 24) my life expectancy is more or less decided, but for unnatural circumstances (i’m assuming here that my lifestyle won’t depend on where i live). So won’t I want to live where my chances of dying due to unnatural circumstances are minimal?

I’m trying to use Mankiw’s data and tryign to figure out what is the probability of an unnatural death in each country. For that, we will need one other data point – that is the average age of unnatural death. Anyways, for now, if I assume that the average age of unnatural death is 40, then in the US, you have a 4.3% chance of dying unnaturally, compared to less than 2% in Germany and 0.3% in the UK. If the average age of unnatural death is 30, then you have a 3.4% chance of getting killed in the US, as compared to 1.5% in Germany and yet another abysmally low number in the UK.

So where do you want to live?

Anyways I have a few questions regarding this
1. What is the average age of death due to unnatural causes? What would be a good estimation of it?
2. Irrespective of this number, it is clear that the proportion of unnatural deaths in the US is much higher than in Europe. Any reasons for this?
3. For? a few countries (Italy, Japan, Canada, etc.) the standardized number is actually less than the observed number. Why could this be so?

A few months back, Steven Levitt had blogged about an idea for terrorism, and people blasted him for it, saying that he is abetting terrorism. Anyways, here is another.

The motivation for this comes from Diwali celebrations yesterday at my cousin’s place. I was lighting a “rocket”, and had placed it inside a bottle. And instead of going straight up, as it is supposed to, it quickly hit the ground and started going along the ground. I got worried for a moment when it went along the ground in the direction of one small girl who was watching (my cousin’s neighbor). And in a moment, I got more worried as the rocket suddenly changed track and headed straight for me!

Thankfully I timed my jump properly and my foot was saved! That whole packet was like that, with a high degree of randomness. The next one went straight for my cousin’s house, and narrowly missed a first floor window. Another went under a car parked nearby, and yet another hit a neighbor’s house.

And I’m confident that the initial positioning of these rockets was ok in all cases, that i’d taken care to ensure that it was placed so that it would go straight up. Just that for some reason the degree of randomness was way too much, causing much tension.

Now, what if terrorists started making fireworks? What if they started slipping in doctored fireworks in the midst of many boxes of good fireworks? It’s like this. Given that testing of fireworks is destructive, only around say 3/4 boxes in a thousand are actually tested for quality. So what I, as a terrorist, would do, is to doctor the fireworks at an undetectable rate. Remember that even if one box in a hundred thousand kills, it could create panic. And I’m sure at this rate of doctoring, randomized destructive tests won’t be able to detect it.

So I would make faulty rockets. “real” bombs. And slip them in in one in a ten thousand boxes or soemthing. And these would LOOK the same as real fireworks. Would be enough to create enough mishaps around the country on a Diwali, and create enough fear in people (which is what Levitt says is the objective of terrorism).

I just hope the terrorists aren’t doign this yet. And do you have any ideas as to how to combat this kind of terrorism? apart from not bursting crackers of course??

Last week, out of sheer enthu, I picked up that xerox copy of Paul Wilmott on Quantitative Finance which was lying torn and dusty in a remote corner of my bedroom, cleaned it and started reading it. I glossed over some of the derivations, ignored the quantitative part of this quantitative book, and found it to be an excellent read. The guy has explained things really well and the book has this nice flowing style, that is so often absent in text books. Some insights

• I still throw a fit when I see the integral sign, unless of course a polynomial is being integrated. And go numb when I see a differential equation. I wonder how I’d handled them seven years ago
• I’m still pretty good at probability and basic statistics
• I’ve managed to “learn back” all that I’d learnt during my internship at J P Morgan, Yes, I remember everything. While I was reading the book, I felt like a guy who’s suffering from amnesia and who is slowly remembering incidents of the past
• I’m still pretty good at understanding derivatives. I may be thoroughly incapable at the complicated models that are used to price them, but I’m pretty good at the fundamentals, and the idea behind most of these things
• I still get a mighty kick out of reading stuff about complicated financial products or trades. For example, this op-ed by Niranjan Rajadhyaksha left me high for almost the whole of last week
• I suck at continuous math, and don’t want to ever encounter it
• The sub prime crisis has helped me immensely in understanding how banks work
• I’m a “high-level” guy. I don’t have an eye for detail. But I can easily see the big picture
• I’m sleepy now so most of the things I planned to put here stand forgotten