SK – Page 83 – Pertinent Observations

The many spectacles of Jurgen Klopp

I haven’t been a big fan of my last two pairs of spectacles. The last one, especially, was chosen carefully after a rather long search across several stores. Yet, within a week or two of purchase, I knew it wasn’t a great choice. Somehow it didn’t look as good on me as I imagined it would. And it’s been hardly four months since I bought it, but I’m already looking for a new pair.

While there are several people whose spectacle frames I’ve much admired, no one comes close to new Liverpool F.C. manager Jurgen Klopp. Not realising that he has several pairs of spectacles, I’ve tweeted on many occasions that I want “Jurgen Klopp spectacle frames”. And then somehow forgotten it when at the optician’s.

With Klopp scheduled to be unveiled as the new Liverpool F.C. manager today (he signed his contract yesterday), the Guardian has put out a nice graphic called “the many faces of Jurgen Klopp”. As far as I’m concerned, though, I don’t care about the faces at all. All I care about are the spectacles! Each one better than the other.

So I present to you, “the many spectacles of Jurgen Klopp”. Watch off!

And while at it, tell me where I can procure such spectacle frames – most stores in Bangalore don’t stock good big matte-finished frames. And don’t tell me LensKart or some such online seller – buying a pair of spectacles is like buying a pair of shoes – you need to feel them, try them on and feel comfortable in them before buying.

Super-specialisation in cricket

Cricket has always been a reasonably specialised sport. You are either a batsman or a bowler or a wicketkeeper or an all-rounder. If you’re a bowler, you’re classified based on your bowling arm and the speed at which you bowl and the spin you impart the ball (last two are not independent). If you’re a batsman you’re classified based on your batting stance and whether you’re an opener or a middle-order batsman.

In Test cricket, there’s further specialisation if you’re a middle-order batsman. You have specialist Number Threes, like Rahul Dravid or Ricky Ponting. You have specialist Number Fours, like Sachin Tendulkar or Younis Khan. Five and six are fungible, but a required ability for both these positions is the ability to bat with the tail.

In One Day cricket, too, there’s some degree of specialisation within the middle order but it’s not to the same extent as in Test Cricket. In One Day cricket, batting orders are more flexible and situation-based. You do have specialist threes (Dravid and Ponting again come to mind) and sixes (usually hitters) but the super-specialisation is not as much as in Test Cricket.

A logical extension of this would be that in T20 cricket, which is played over an even shorter duration and where batting orders are even more flexible, you don’t need even as much of specialisation as in ODIs. However, Siddharth Monga argues in this piece that this lack of specialisation is why India isn’t doing as well as it could in T20s (having just lost the home series to South Africa).

In other words, what Monga is arguing is that Kohli, Raina and Sharma are all similar batsmen and effectively Number Threes for their IPL franchises, and when they are arranged 2-4 or 3-5 in the Indian national team, two of them are effectively batting out of position.

It would be interesting if Monga is indeed right and that T20s require a higher degree of specialisation than ODIs. It is also interesting that India’s number 6, MS Dhoni, bats like a typical number 5 in T20s, accumulating for a while before going bonkers. Maybe T20 will end up as a much more specialised sport than Tests? That would be interesting to watch.

The problem with Twitter

Starting from the mid-2000s, the dominant method to consume content was to follow individual blogs through RSS Feed readers such as Bloglines or Google Reader. You followed specific blogs, most of which (unlike this one) had content on specific topics.

So when I wanted to learn up on economics, I started following Marginal Revolution and Econlog. When I wanted to follow the global financial crisis, I added Felix Salmon and a couple of other blogs (which I don’t remember now). All I needed to do to read on specific topics was to follow specific people.

And then Google Reader Shared Items happened. Now, you didn’t really need to follow specific blogs, for there was a social network where people would share interesting stuff that they read. Now you could outsource following blogs to friends who became curators. So there was this one friend who would share pretty much every interesting post on Mashable. Another shared every interesting post from this blog called The Frontal Cortex. I didn’t need to follow these blogs. My “curator friends” shared the best pieces with me (and I know people relied on me for Econlog etc.).

Then around the turn of the decade, Twitter replaced Google Reader Shared Items as the primary content discovery platform. A couple of years later, Google would decommission Reader. The thing with Twitter was that the movement from following specific ideas and sites to following “curators” was complete.

While twitter also functions as a “normal” social network, a major function is the sharing of ideas, and so everyone on twitter is essentially a curator, sharing with her followers what she wants them to read. There is also scope for adding comments here, and adding one’s opinion to the content. This adds a sort of richness to the content, and people can filter stuff accordingly, without consuming everything one’s friend has shared.

The downside, however, is that you are forced to consume the opinions and links shared by everyone you follow. There might be someone who I might be following for his curation of technology links, but it might happen that he might also tweet heavily on politics, which I’m hardly interested in. There is an option to turn off retweets (which I’ve used liberally) but even so, there is a lot of “unwanted content” you have to consume from people. And since it is “opinion first” (and link later), you are forced to consume people’s opinion even if you’re just browsing their timeline.

What we need in Twitter is a way to curate people’s opinions on topics. For example, I might be interested in Person A’s opinion on politics but not anything else. Person B might offer good opinions on economics but might be lousy on other things. Person C might be good for technology and sports. And so forth.

Of course, you can’t charge people with classifying their own tweets – that will add too much friction to the process. What you need is an intelligent process or app that can help classify people’s tweets and show you only what you want to know.

I can think of a couple of designs for the app – one could be where you could tell it not to show any more tweets from someone on a particular topic (or block a topic itself). Another is for you to upvote and downvote tweets, so that the app learns your preferences and shows you what you want.

Yet, I’m not confident that such an app will be built. The problem is that twitter has been notorious in terms of cutting off access to its API to apps built on it, or cutting permissions of what apps can see (Facebook is as guilty here). So it’s a massive challenge to get people to actually invest in building twitter apps.

Twitter as it exists currently doesn’t work for me, though. I repeatedly find the problem that there is way too much outrage on my timeline, and despite mercilessly cutting the number of people I follow, I find that it’s a slippery slope and otherwise interesting people continue to tweet about stuff that I don’t want to read about. And so my engagement is dipping.

I don’t need twitter itself to do anything about it. All they should do is to send out credible signals that they’ll not pull the rug under the feet of developers, so that APIs can be developed, which can make the platform a much more pleasant experience for users.

What did Brendan in? Priors? The schedule? Or the cups?

So Brendan Rodgers has been sacked as Liverpool manager, after what seems like an indifferent start to the season. The club is in tenth position with 12 points after 8 games, with commentators noting that “at the same stage last season” the club had 13 points from 8 games.

Yet, the notion of “same stage last season” is wrong, as I’d explained in this post I’d written two years back (during Liverpool’s last title chase), since the fixture list changes year on year. As I’ve explained in that post, a better way to compare a club’s performance is to compare its performance this season to corresponding fixtures from last season.

Looking at this season from such a lens (and ignoring games against promoted teams Bournemouth and Norwich), this is what Liverpool’s season so far looks like:

Fixture	This season	Last season	Difference
Stoke away	Win	Loss	+3
Arsenal away	Draw	Loss	+1
West Ham home	Loss	Win	-3
Manchester United Away	Loss	Loss	0
Aston Villa home	Win	Loss	+3
Everton away	Draw	Draw	0

In other words, compared to similar fixtures last season, Liverpool is on a +4 (winning two games and drawing one among last season’s losses, and losing one of last season’s wins). In fact, if we look at the fixture schedule, apart from the games against promoted sides (which Liverpool didn’t do wonderfully in, scraping through with an offside goal against Bournemouth and drawing with Norwich), Liverpool have had a pretty tough start to the season in terms of fixtures.

So the question is what led to Brendan Rodgers’ dismissal last night? Surely it can’t be the draw at Everton, for that has become a “standard result” of late? Maybe the fact that Liverpool didn’t win allowed the management to make the announcement last evening, but surely the decision had been made earlier?

The first possibility is that the priors had been stacked against Rodgers. Considering the indifferent performance last season in both the league (except for one brilliant spell) and the cups, and the sacking of Rodgers’ assistants, it’s likely that the benefit of the doubt before the season began was against Rodgers, and only a spectacular performance could have turned it around.

The other possibility is indifferent performances in the cups, with 1-1 home draws against FC Sion and Carlisle United being the absolute low points, in fixtures that one would have expected Liverpool to win easily (albeit with weakened sides). While Liverpool is yet to exit any cup, indifferent performances so far meant that there hasn’t been much improvement in the squad since last season.

Leaving aside a “bad prior” at the beginning of the season and cup performances (no pun intended), there’s no other reason to sack Rodgers. As my analysis above shows, his performance in the league hasn’t been particularly bad in terms of results, with only the defeat to West Ham and possibly the draw to Norwich being bad. If Fenway Sports Group (the owners of Liverpool FC) have indeed sacked Rodgers on his league performance, it simply means that they don’t fully get the “Moneyball” philosophy that they supposedly follow, and could do with some quant consulting.

And if they’re reading this, they should know who to approach for such consulting services!

Bring on the Blook

I’m normally not one to notice such stuff, but I was randomly browsing my site stats the other day and found that I had published 1997 posts till then (not including the three that I’d published and subsequently withdrew for various reasons). I’ve written two more posts after that which makes this one the 2000th post on this blog (including its predecessor). It’s taken a bit more than 11 years (I started blogging in August 2004) to reach this milestone.

A couple of years back, I’d considered writing a “blook”. “Blook“, for the uninitiated, is a book that is based on a blog. So you don’t really write a blook. You simply compile posts from your own blog, fix them in a logical order, write a foreword, and there it is! Back when I had considered the blook, I thought I didn’t have enough good posts on this blog. And then set myself a target of “another 200 blog posts”. I forget when I set this target. It doesn’t matter.

If I’ve written 2000 blog posts so far, I’m sure at least a 100 (5%) of them are pretty good, and good enough to share with a wider world than my readers? So this time, I’m seriously considering publishing a blook.

I’m looking for an editor to assist me in this exercise. The job of the editor is to go through my 2000 blog posts, and identify a 100 or so “good posts” (which are in a sense “timeless”) and figure out a way to compile and curate and put them together under themes, perhaps, in order to compile a blook. I could possibly do it myself, but I might be biased, and attached in unhealthy ways to certain posts, so I’d prefer a trusted third party to take this up.

So if you think you can edit my blog into a blook, or know someone who can do that, please do let me know. I’m really serious about it this time. We can figure out a “structure” to compensate your efforts. And you will get editing credits for the blook.

A little celebratory speech before that: when I started writing in 2004, little did I know that I would hit 2000 blog posts one day. I thank all my readers, loyal and disloyal. I thank people who have cared to comment on this blog over the years (excluding the spambots), for it’s they who’ve kept me going. I thank people who’ve brought up subjects from this blog for discussion in social gatherings. And last but not the least, I thank my wife, who I met through this blog (it’s predecessor to be precise), and who constantly berates me for not writing enough about her!

Oh, and don’t forget the blook!

On 2ab, Communal Harmony and Economic Growth

I’ve used the concept of “2ab” once before, a day after the Prime Minister used the term in a much lampooned remark, to explain why we need Net Neutrality. I turn to the same concept again to explain why communal harmony is necessary for economic growth.

Some 4-5 days back, a mob entered the house of one Muslim guy who was allegedly cooking beef, and lynched him to death. In response, rather than booking the mob, the police sent meat sample from the victim’s house to “test if he was actually cooking beef” – as if its confirmation as beef would justify the murder.

I’ve mostly been off social media (and hence not fully following the story) since then, but RSS leader Tarun Vijay hasmade some remarks about “lynching on suspicion being wrong“, and star Indian Express columnist Pratap Bhanu Mehta has laid the blame at the Prime Minister’s feet. Mehta writes (HT: V Anantha Nageswaran):

The blame for this has to fall entirely on Modi. Those who spread this poison enjoy his patronage. This government has set a tone that is threatening, mean-spirited and inimical to freedom. Modi should have no doubt that he bears responsibility for the poison that is being spread by the likes of Culture Minister Mahesh Sharma and Vijay — whether through powerlessness or design is irrelevant. But we can be grateful to Vijay for reminding us that the threat to India’s soul emanates from the centre of power, almost nowhere else. It is for that centre, and Modi in particular, to persuade us otherwise.

Now there were two kinds of people Modi appealed to when he came to power in a resounding victory last year – bigots and aspirers. The former hoped that Modi would “teach a lesson to the Muslims”. The latter hoped that Modi would help accelerate economic growth, after a mostly useless and scam-ridden UPA2 government. And Modi might have thought that these two goals are compatible (else it would make no sense to court these two constituencies). Even in theory they are not.

The Gross Domestic Product (GDP), whose growth rate is seen as a bellwether of the economy’s performance, is a measure of the amount of trade. Trade can be external (let’s set that aside for now) and internal. There are many factors that determine the extent of internal trade (trade between the people of the country), but at the margin, it is proportional to the number of possible pairs of people who can trade with each other.

In other words, trade is another of those quantities that follows Metcalfe’s Law, and depends on strong network effects. If the number of people in a place (region or country or state or city) is $N$ , and if everyone can trade with one another, the number of possible trading relationships is $N^2$ .

Despite the development of the rule of law and Contract Acts and court-brokered dispute settlements, people typically trade with other people they can trust. In the past, this meant that certain families or communities had a monopoly over trade. Over time, with the development of laws and contracts and courts, this has expanded. Yet, people still hesitate to trade with people they don’t trust.

So what happens when there is communal or caste disharmony? Then you will not trust someone who belongs to another caste or community or religion because of the person’s community (and notwithstanding the person’s personal characteristics). And if you don’t trust them, you don’t trade with them. And what does this mean for the total volume of trade?

It’s time to bring out our $(a+b)^2$ expansion. If you have two communities of sizes $a$ and $b$ , in the absence of trust between the communities, the total trade in the community is ceteris paribus proportional to $a^2 + b^2$ . If the two communities live harmoniously and have enough mutual trust that communal differences have no bearing on trade, the total trade in the community is ceteris paribus proportional to $(a+b)^2$ . The difference between the two? $2ab$ of course!

Communal distrust and the lack of communal harmony ends up restricting the number of possible trading partners for each person, and thus we lose out in terms of the correlation term. In other words, bigotry costs us in terms of GDP growth.

Lastly, even if the government of the day is concerned more about the welfare of one particular community over another, communal harmony makes sense. For by creating distrust, people belonging to the government’s favourite community are denied trade with people of the less favoured community. And this adversely impacts the more favoured community!

An unauthorised biography of an unauthorised biography

I just finished reading a book which was like a Telugu movie – the beginning promised much, as did the reviews. About a third into the book, I was sending excerpts from its chapters to friends. Two thirds in, I was rather engrossed. And then it all fell apart, going into polemic territory in the last third.

I’m talking about Felix Martin’s Money: The unauthorised biography. When I found the book on the shelves of Blossom Book House two weekends back, I immediately reached for my phone and checked for reviews. Largely positive reviews by The Guardian and The Economist meant that I was compelled to buy it. And the first two thirds of the book was pretty excellent.

There is one very strong idea in the book – that we should look at money not as a commodity but as a system of maintaining credit. Martin gives the example of the Fei in a Pacific Island called Yap to illustrate this, and makes a rather compelling case for not treating money as a commodity.

And he does this by giving examples from ancient and medieval history – the book is peppered with nice examples from Mesopotamia and Greece and the Warring States of China. In between he returns to modern times and talks about how Argentina in the 2000s and Ireland in the 1960s reacted to closure of banks – all of it lending further credence to his theory of money being a means of credit rather than a commodity.

He talks about the pyramidal structure of credit in medieval Italy and the fairs of Lyons. Considerable footage is given to the formation of the Bank of England and John Locke’s recommendations on debasement of the currency (these parts were easier for me to appreciate, having read Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle) and John Law’s exploits in France.

And then, with the book nicely set up two thirds in, he turns it into a polemic against investment banks and what prompted the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. Again, some of the stuff is impressive, like Walter Bagehot’s recommendations following a credit crisis in the 1860s, and Keynes’s recommendations after the First World War. But the last sixty pages or so are close to unreadable, especially for someone who’s fairly closely followed the 2008 crisis.

This is not the first time that a book on history falls away when it gets to modern history. Another example of this is Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, which again begins extremely strongly in its description of prehistory and ancient history, but somehow falls away when it comes to the modern world (ending with a rather unreadable chapter on immortality and the Methuselah project). There are more examples that I can’t currently recall of books that do a great job of ancient history but fall apart when they come to modern times.

Money would have been a significantly better book had it stopped at around the 220th page or so, following the recommendations of Walter Bagehot – but maybe with some final recommendations. Till then it’s a fantastic book, but then there seems to be a compulsion to provide recommendations, where it falls away (this is again a common bugbear, where books fall apart when they try to provide recommendations). I’d recommend you read it, but not beyond page 220 (totally ~280 pages).

Oh, and for a change I read the physical copy of the book (since I found a copy at Blossom Book House), so that copy is available to be lent out.

Social Reading

Feedly, the RSS Reader I’ve been using ever since Google Reader shut down, has announced a feature called “Shared Collections“. This is something like the Google Reader shared items (much loved by its loyal users including me, but something that apparently wasn’t good enough for Google to retain), except that it is available only for premium users.

While this is in theory a great move by Feedly to start shared collections, recognising the unfulfilled demand for social reading post Google Reader, their implementation leaves a lot to be desired. And I’m writing this without having used the feature, for, in an extremely daft move, it is available only for pro users. My problem is with the pricing model, which charges content creators (or curators or aggregators, if you like to call them that) for sharing content!

There are so many things wrong with this that I don’t know where to start. Firstly, if you charge people for creating content, that significantly increases the barrier to creating content. If there is an article I like and want to share with my (currently non-existent) followers, the fact that I have to create a premium account to do so means that the barrier to doing so is too high.

Secondly, if I’m going to be a consumer of shared collections from other people, I’ll need a certain critical mass of friends before I start using the feature. I won’t start using a feature only because one or two friends are curating content on it. The critical mass is much higher. And by putting barriers to entry to people who want to share, it makes this critical mass even more difficult to obtain.

Thirdly, Feedly doesn’t have a social network of itself so far (though I’m not aware what permissions they’ve taken from my when I used my Google account to log in to the service). And without having a ready social network for discovery (Google Reader leveraged the Google Talk network), how do they expect people to discover each other’s collections, once created? Are they relying on external networks such as Facebook or Twitter?

It is not easy to build a social network of curation. Google Reader had managed it quite well back in the day by first allowing people to share items without comment, then add external content, and then to add comments. It was an extremely powerful way for people to share blogs and other content, and discussion on that was rather active. I even remember quite a few people adding me on Google Talk for the sole reason of wanting to follow my Shared Items.

In recent times we’ve seen the news aggregator app Flipboard starting its personal collections feature. I have a collection, but don’t remember the last time I put something into it – for without any interaction on that, there’s absolutely no motivation. Flipboard, by the way, has access to your Facebook and Twitter graphs, and so has access to some sort of a social network. Yet, despite keeping the feature free, they haven’t been able to generate sufficient activity on it.

Feedly has got just about everything wrong with its Shared Collections feature. There is disincentive for content creators. There is no incentive for content consumers. They don’t have a ready social network. And there doesn’t seem to be any interaction.

If only Google were to bring back Google Reader and Shared Items, now that they’ve decided to dismantle Google+.

Large sites and universally accessible blocks

Currently reading this paper by Brelsford, Martin, Hand and Bettencourt of the Santa Fe Institute (did I tell you I just got my first MOOC certificate from this institute last week?) on the topology of cities. I have only a rudimentary understanding of topology (thanks to an excellent session with Dr. V Vinay), but considering that I know Graph Theory fairly well, I’ve been able to follow the paper so far.

The paper talks about “universally accessible blocks” in cities, which is basically about blocks where each unit can be accessed directly by road without going through other units. Developed cities, the paper argues, has mostly universally accessible blocks, while non-universally accessible blocks are artefacts of non-developed countries and old cities.

The problem with non-univerally accessible blocks is that the “inner units” in such blocks (which are not directly accessible by road) are mostly deprived of public and emergency services and this affects the quality of life in such blocks. The paper, for example, talks about mostly slums having such architecture, and that newly developed cities usually try to have universally accessible blocks.

When Bangalore was developed in a planned fashion starting in the 1950s (led by the “City Improvement Trust Board” which later morphed into the “Bangalore Development Authority”), a number of new areas were designed for large houses. Large sites were allotted, and regulations framed such that buildings on such sites be sparse (they were called “bungalow sites”). The part of Bangalore I live in, Jayanagar, for example, has a large concentration of such bungalow sites.

While in theory such sites make sense, the fact is that not too many people were enthused about sparse buildings on such sites. So they took advantage of loopholes in regulation (even best designed policies have loopholes) to build multiple buildings on the site. Later on, these sites got partitioned into smaller sites, with at least one building on each smaller site. As a result of partitioning, a large number of units thus created were not “accessible”.

Allotting big sites and getting people to build big houses on them in order to “lead development” into a new area might have been a great idea in theory, but the fact that most people could not afford to build such big houses and loopholes in regulation resulted in non-accessible units! Of course it results in lower infrastructure costs (since the road network is sparser than is necessary), but it comes at a price since not everyone has equal access to infrastructure.

As a wise man once said, #thatzwhy we need strong regulation.

When Kara met Pinky

Readers of this blog might have noticed that I have an above-average long-term memory, and frequently indulge in “this day that year” exercises. While I have blogged about it a couple of times in the past, I do this practically every day – wonder what happened on that day in a previous year.

There are some anniversaries that are special, though. And there is no particular number – the special anniversaries are those where both date and day of week coincide. This usually happens at a frequency of five or six years (depending on the leap cycle), though it can be longer at times. For example, I vividly remember all years when my birthday was on a Sunday (1987, 1992, 1998 and 2009), and they were all spectacular (so I’m hoping for a spectacular birthday this year, too).

Anyway, today is the 28th of September, and it is a Monday. The last time 28th September was a Monday was back in 2009, and in hindsight it turned out to be a rather special day. The previous evening my “chat friend” had called me, trying to explain why she didn’t want to meet me. I convinced her to meet me the following day. And we agreed to meet in Basavanagudi (basically I was playing on “home ground”).

We spent some three hours together that day, and for virtual strangers who had only bantered on Orkut and LiveJournal and GTalk earlier, the breadth and depth and ease of conversation was rather spectacular. I remember this rather “special” feeling as I walked back home that day.

I promptly freaked out, and wrote this blog post:

Yesterday I met a friend, an extremely awesome woman. Once I was back home, I sent a mail to my relationship advisor, detailing my meeting with this friend. And I described her (the awesome friend) as being “super CMP”. I wrote in the mail “I find her really awesome. In each and every component she clears the CMP cutoff by a long way”. That’s how I’ve become. I’ve lost it. I’ve lost my heart. And I need to find it back. And I don’t know if I should continue in the arranged scissors market.

She seemed more positive than that. This is what she wrote:

First step is to keep your eyes open to delicious and nutritious tharkaris(potential marriage material girls/boys). Then, somehow thru some network, make someone set you two up. Third, interact. with tact. Fourth, put meet. or beat. Fifth, this can go in two ways now. Or more. First, is a no. Definite no. Second, yes. Full yes. Okay, there’s a third possibility too. Third, Yes, but not yet. This is a lucrative possibility which gives super scope to put more meets, learn about each others funny faces, food tastes, sense of humour, patience, sense of dressing, chappliying, smells, etc. Finally, it’ll end up in louuvu..maybe not the gut churning romantic feeling for the other party like a unit function, out of nowhere. This is more sustainable like a step function built on affection, tolerance, enjoying each others company, comfort, care, etc and if it were to ever fall apart then it would be one step at a time and less painful.

Things moved reasonably fast after that. Exactly fourteen months after we first met, we got married. We had fun. We occasionally fought. We bought a house. And we went long distance. Yet, in the last six years, I’ve never done anything for any of our anniversaries (date or marriage). There have been some customary dinners but nothing spectacular.

So I thought I should make a video this time. I decided to retrace the path of our first date, recalling some memorable bits of the conversation, All photos and videos were shot with a hand-held Nikon D90. I got creepy looks from people around. Lots of people asked me what I was doing. But the photowalk experience helped.

Normally, it’s the wife who stitches up the NED Talks videos, and this was my first experience with iMovies. Both my inexperience and my general lack of attention to detail clearly shows. Commentary was recorded in “synch sound” (along with the video). And I hope youtube doesn’t take down this video citing copyright issues.