"The shopper's revenge"

Nice technology… I have often wished I could read reviews of books on Amazon when I’m standing in a bookstore trying to figure out whether to buy it or not.  And for other electronics items as well…

 

Your could use Amazon’s service on an iPod or just go to their website on your handheld

 

http://www.slate.com/id/2206255/

 

Need an x-ray? Just peel the tape

“It may sound bizarre—or like some kind of high school science fair project, but it's not: Researchers have discovered that peeling adhesive tape ejects enough radiation to take an x-ray image. If they stick, the findings could set the stage for a less expensive x-ray machine that does not require electricity.”

 

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=x-ray-machine-adhesive-tape

 

 

How BRICs buy clothese

Do Indians shop differently than much of developing world?

 

Courtesy: HBS Daily Stat, McKinsey Quarterly

http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Retail_Consumer_Goods/Sectors_Regions/How_half_the_world_shops_Apparel_in_Brazil_China_and_India_2075?gp=1

 

 

Cautiously Optimistic

Is it just me or have all writers decided that the best ending for literary fiction is to make it cautiously optimistic.  Whether it is The Kite Runner, Purple Hibiscus or Sea of Poppies, it seems cautiously optimistic is the way to go.  Whatever happened to the outright tragedies a la Shakespeare or simply satisfying happy endings?

 

Or is it that to cross the bridge from simply fiction to ‘literary fiction’ your story must leave you some open ends?

 

Would you like fries, and gender roles, with that?

An interesting piece talking about gender roles in fine dining experience…

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/08/dining/08gend.html?pagewanted=1&em

 

 

Politics of trinkets

Once upon a time, there was a company that sold books and stuff online called Amanzo. It sold billions of dollars worth of stuff. Then inevitably one day, elections were held in the land of its headquarters. It was a hotly contested election. The company decided that it should join the thousands of polling companies trying to figure out the outcome of the elections. One executive at the company realizes that they have millions of customers. Couldn't they poll them? Another adds a brilliant twist: why don't we sell Republican elephants and Democrat donkeys? Based on their sales we will know which party is going to win. The executives congratulated themselves on this brilliant plan!

The trinket selling began in earnest. The sales leaned this way and that.

But some customers realized that this is quite stupid. What this measures is how likely are repulican and democrat supporters to buy silly trinkets to display their affiliation at places of work and home. And before an executive could say 'golden parachute', a more interesting thing had happened. The customers of the company were engaged in a debate about the implications of such a "poll".

Binge drinking to save social security

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/19/can-binge-drinking-save-social-security/

 

“the elimination of heavy drinking (three or more drinks a day) from each successive group of American 25-year-olds would cost the Social Security trust fund $3 billion over the cohort’s lifetime.”

 

"See beyond the woman"

Some sensible thoughts on women in the workplace by Sandra Dawson, Nonexecutive Director of Barclays Bank and Master of Sidney Sussex College, Univ of Cambridge.

 

 

When you are the only woman in any situation, I think it is often quite difficult for men to get beyond the idea that “this is the woman speaking.” In most boards, gender is the most obvious difference, since there is often little diversity in culture or education. So it can be a challenge to “see beyond the woman.” Maybe when you get two or three, it encourages a different perspective, which prompts the thought, “Oh—women do not necessarily think alike.” And that is the breakthrough in any prejudicial situation: to see the person and not the category or stereotype.

…There is still some institutionalized prejudice, which is extremely difficult for women—or men—to tackle, as it can be deeply ingrained. However, it is no longer dominant in many organizations. Most people at the top of companies really want to enable more of their very able young women to succeed and get to the top. So it is not that they do not want to encourage women; it is not even that they do not want to encourage them at a subconscious level. It is that they do not recognize the micro-inequalities of which you speak, so all of us, men and women, need to be alert to these subtle forces and work to eradicate them.

Read full interview in McKinsey Quarterly (free subscription may be required):

http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/Organization/Talent/Seeing_beyond_the_woman_An_interview_with_a_pioneering_academic_and_board_member_2194_abstract

 

Importing US law, or not

It seems that Supreme Courts of countries around the world are relying less and less on US law.  The number of cases where they cite American judicial decisions has fallen to ½, and in some cases to 1/3^rd in a period of a decade or so. It seems more countries are citing Canadian and European decisions these days.  And, in the case of Australia, even judicial decisions from India.

 

This could also be one way of measuring American popularity and respect overseas.  If you don’t respect a country you would not be particularly inclined to cite its decisions in making your own, would you?

 

Read full article at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/18/us/18legal.html?em

 

 

Robot car drives around SF

A Prius fitted with self-guiding equipment drove itself around in SF without incident. The technology is quite ready for prime time (the team had to drive the same route ahead of time and do a high-accuracy scan of the route) but it is still quite intriguing.

Read more at CNET

Alaskan police chase solar-powered UFO

Do they really have nothing better to do, than chase UFOs? In case it really was a UFO, what did they plan do next?

The UFO turned out to be a solar powered car.

Courtesy: CNET

Beethoven's Work Hours

Given my employer’s policy on monitoring hours worked, the Aug 31 Dilbert comic seems particularly apt.

http://dilbert.com

 

 

Monkeys of the human kind

I was at Hampi last weekend and I noticed an odd phenomenon for a tourist spot in India – bands (12-15 strong) of young men perhaps in early 20s roaming around being rowdy and obnoxious, especially towards women. Now if you’ve been in India, you’ll know that this is a common sight on Indian road-sides. But this was my first sighting of this at a tourist spot.

So you can imagine my first reaction to sighting packs of these, umm…, men.

On our third day at Hampi, we decided to go to the ruins but do our own thing. Out of our group of 5, two decided to climb a hill, two decided to go birding and I decided to go spend some time at an amazing spot next to the river.



It is a rocky spot with giant boulders strewn every which way, giving the spot a feeling of being an animation rather than real-life. The river which is dammed further up, flows down some of these rocks, with the flow controlled by flood gates at the dam. The previous day we had watched salmon trying to jump upstream over a one meter water fall. And, to make it even better, there is a one meter high rock sitting all alone on a flattish rocky surface. All in all a perfect spot for spending an hour daydreaming at 8 in the morning.

My plan was to go sit on the rock for some time and after a while go stand in the river with water up to my ankles.

When I got to my rock, as I’d come to think of it by now J, I noticed a pack of 15+ of these men about 20 feet downstream, generally enjoying themselves in the water. I figured if they want to run around in their underwear at a public place that is their problem not mine. I decided to perch myself on the rock and admire the rocks on the upstream side. After staring at me for varying amounts of time, these men decided to go back to playing in the water, which was just fine with me. This is roughly what I had hoped/expected.

Such packs of men, in the words of Douglas Adams in the “Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy”, are “mostly harmless”. Though you have to keep repeating that to yourself if you find yourself alone with over a dozen of them.

Hardly 5 minutes after the first group had left, a smaller set of 5-6 descended near the rock. They also found the sight of a woman sitting peacefully a few meters away too hard to ignore, but again they lost interest after a few minutes and decided to catch some fish with their bare hands from the river and transfer them to a tiny shallow pool formed at the side of the river.

I descended to the flat rocks and stood for some time with my feet in the water. It was quite fun as the officials at the dam upstream were varying the flow of water. The water level at my feet would change from 2-3 inches to about 8-10 inches within a matter of minutes, and then go down again.

All was well. The fish-transporting operation had stopped. The men had decided to show off their bravery by crossing the river which has a bed of flattish slippery boulders.

I returned to my rock for a final round of day-dreaming before heading back. That is when the final group of another half-dozen men arrived. One of them just could not stand the fact that a woman was sitting on a boulder minding her own business. First he walked around the boulder once about 18 inches away from the edge. Then he came back and stood leaning against the boulder three feet away. Then he decided that was too far and inched to within a foot and a half and stood looking away towards the river. I continued to ignore him.

Then he turned around slowly and started addressing me. First something in Kannada. Then I caught “Hello”. “Sister”. Then something else I don’t remember. Full sentences in Kannada were coming my way. I didn’t utter a word or change my expression but was rapidly thinking whether I could reach my hiking boots quickly enough and hit him on the head which was at my knee level in one smooth move. More wishful thinking than anything else J, but it never hurts to have a backup plan in case things get worse. I also looked around to see if there was any civilized person in sight who may give me a hand if needed. Just when I had mentally perfected my move, the guy decided he’d had enough and moved to watch the hoopla around the few fish in the puddle.

By now it was time to go back and I was sick of these…men. And the two more rowdies I encountered on the steps back would surely have gotten one in the ribs if they had come any closer.

The whole episode had one positive side-effect: it increased my resolve to go work out at the gym more frequently than the 2-3 days a week I’ve been doing. Aah, but like all good-intentioned resolves, it disintegrated once I got back into the daily rhythm of work in Bangalore.

But the time I spent enjoying the view at the banks of the Tungabhadra river with water running over my feet will remain with me for a long time.


---

Pay students for test performance

I had written in March about an experiment taking place in NY schools about paying students for performance.  They have had mixed results.  One specific feature of the program was paying for taking and passing Advanced Placement tests, on which you can get scores ranging from 0 to 5.  The kids get $1000 if they get a 5 and less for lower scores. It seems that number of kids with a score of 5 increased, while the number at 4 and 3 actually decreased slightly. So, the results are mixed at best.

 

They’ve decided to continue the program for one more year.  Last year the program was announced after the school year had already started.  So this year will be the real test.

 

Read more: NYT

 

Digging for energy

Some time ago Google.org (Google’s foundation) had announced that it would invest in making renewable energy cheaper than coal.  It seems that the company has started in investing in geothermal technology.

 

See more at: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=google-invests-in-geothermal&sc=rss

That makes Google.org the largest funder of enhanced geothermal research in the country, outspending the U.S. government. The Australian government has pledged $43.5 million for such projects and already has several in the works, as do Europe and Japan.

…Mastering said drilling is why Google.org also invested $4 million into Potter Drilling, a Redwood City, Calif., enterprise built from EGS drilling work done at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico during the last oil crisis in the 1970s. As it stands, the oil and gas industry routinely drills wells of more than 18,000 feet—nearly 3.5 miles, or 5.5 kilometers—which would "essentially unlock the entire country" to produce geothermal power, said Dan Reicher, director for climate change and energy initiatives at Google.org and former assistant secretary of energy for energy efficiency and renewable energy at the U.S. Department of Energy, at the same conference.

…And, even if the rigs become available, it remains unclear just exactly what is lurking where under the surface. Maps for geothermal potential have not been updated since 1974 despite more than a million new oil and gas wells in the interim offering more data. So Google.org is also giving $489,521 to Southern Methodist University's Geothermal Laboratory to update the resource maps.

 

 

LHC pictures and comments

See the pictures below but don't forget to go through the comments.  They offer an interesting insight into human nature.

 

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/08/the_large_hadron_collider.html

 

 

 

LHC rap

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=new-bytes-of-the-week-lhc-gets-its-own-rap-song&sc=rss

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtM

 

J

 

Plant migrations

You’ve heard of bird migrations, here’s something different: plant migration. It seems that plants are beginning to migrate in search of cooler climes.

 

“The researchers found that grasses, herbs and other short-lived species that had been through many generations shifted the most in search of perfect temperatures, whereas long-lived trees stayed largely in place. According to the authors, this is changing the composition of the forest—mixing formerly low-altitude grasses with high-altitude trees—which could potentially affect the entire ecosystem, particularly the animals that rely on specific plants to survive.”

 

Courtesy: SciAm

 

No cheating in front of the mirror

Research shows that people are less likely to cheat or demonstrate other undesirable behavior when working in front of a mirror. Perhaps we should mandate that all interior walls in our politicians’ offices are covered with mirrors. I’m sure they will become immune to it after they get used to it in a couple of weeks, but for a few weeks at least, we’ll have a cleaner government.

“Other researchers have determined that mirrors can subtly affect human behavior, often in surprisingly positive ways. Subjects tested in a room with a mirror have been found to work harder, to be more helpful and to be less inclined to cheat, compared with control groups performing the same exercises in nonmirrored settings. Reporting in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, C. Neil Macrae, Galen V. Bodenhausen and Alan B. Milne found that people in a room with a mirror were comparatively less likely to judge others based on social stereotypes about, for example, sex, race or religion.”

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/22/science/22angi.html?pagewanted=1&8dpc

To stop eating chips, change your couch

"Dr. Wood studied exercise habits among students who transferred from one college to another. When locations remained stable - the new school had an outdoor track just like the old school, for example - students continued running regularly. But if the tracks were too different, the exercise tapered off, on average. In another experiment, conducted by researchers studying smokers, those wanting to quit were more than twice as successful if they started kicking the habit while on vacation, when surrounded by unfamiliar people and places.

""Habits are formed when the memory associates specific actions with specific places or moods," said Dr. Wood, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke. "If you regularly eat chips while sitting on the couch, after a while, seeing the couch will automatically prompt you to reach for the Doritos. These associations are sometimes so strong that you have to replace the couch with a wooden chair for a diet to succeed."

"The researchers at P.& G. realized that these types of findings had enormous implications for selling Febreze. Because bad smells occurred too infrequently for a Febreze habit to form, marketers started looking for more regular cues on which they could capitalize."

Read on at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/business/13habit.html?pagewanted=4&ei=5087&em&en=8521c49a071adef5&ex=1216094400

Octopus "handedness"

It seems that some researchers are trying to figure out if octopuses (octopi?) are left handed or right handed, or rather, more accurately, if they prefer some of their appendages over others for various tasks.

 

As much as I love science and enjoy learning about esoteric research, I have ask: Is this really the best use of science resources (scientists, their free-labor students, and money)?

 

The article claims that the results will help make octopuses life in captivity a bit easier, that is, instead of feeding them food from left side, we can now feed them from the right side.

 

Ummm, maybe it’s just me, but if I’m stuck in a cage for life, I’m not sure how much I would care about the food being served from the window to my left or the one on my right…

 

http://www.sciam.com/gallery_directory.cfm?photo_id=04A6AC54-DFF7-6744-EA8131F1594C0B55&sc=rss

 

 

Relocating to Mars, anyone?

NASA scientists have analyzed soil on the Martian surface using equipment on Phoenix Lander, and found it to have enough minerals to support earth plants.  It may even be possible for it to support microbes below the surface.  On the surface of Mars, they obviously don’t expect any microbes because it is fully exposure to UV radiation in the absence of sufficient atmosphere.

 

Go to http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=martian-soil-fit-for-earthly-life&sc=rss for more details.

 

I am not a lady

An open letter

Dear colleague,

I want to make it clear for the second time that I am a woman. I am a female member of the human species. I am NOT a “lady”.

Today was the umpteenth time I saw you use the word “ladies” to refer to your female colleagues. I felt like hitting you on the head but since that might disqualify me from actually being a lady in the 1920s sense of the word, I stopped myself.

Instead, I decided to be helpful. For your reference, here is a guide on the correct usage of the word lady. You may use the word when referring to:

1. Members of English aristocracy
2. Women over 70
3. Women who are doing something crazy, as in “Lady, are you nuts?”
4. As a reprimand, usually preceded by the word “young”: “Young lady, how many times have I told you not to hit your male colleagues?”

I assume you thought it would be more “respectful” in some old-fashioned way to refer to women as “ladies”. But by using this word in a clearly artificial manner, you actually made it quite clear that you don’t quite know how to deal with women colleagues as equals. Why else would you say things like:

• Each team should have 11 players with a minimum of 2 ladies and max of 9 gents
• Opening batting pair should have at least 1 lady
• First over must be bowled by a lady and faced by a lady
• And so on
  

Or perhaps I have misunderstood the whole thing. Maybe this is a costume party cum cricket match. I wonder whether any Bangalore theatre groups carry Victorian-era gowns.

Here’s a thought: If you think calling a woman a woman is too matter-of-fact, maybe you can call us the “XX chromosomed” humans. At least it will be accurate. Then your invitation for cricket would read something like this:

• Each team should have players with a total of 13 X and 9 Y chromosomes
• Opening batting pair must be exclusively X chromosomed
• No Y chromosomes allowed in first over bowling and batting
• Etc.

Yours sincerely,
A woman

Privacy matters

Today I need a “proof of employment” letter from my employer. Upon putting in the request, the first question I got asked was “what for?”. To put this in perspective, “proof of employment” letters in India are demanded for everything – whether it is filing for a visa, applying for a credit card, a phone-line, renting an apartment, anything. In essence, they act as proof of who you say you are, and they are demanded by everyone. The only person who hasn’t asked me for one yet is an auto-driver.

Now, my employer has a policy of asking why it is needed. Why is it my employer’s business? If I am doing something illegal, clearly I can fabricate a letter of employment without going to my employer. If I am doing something legal, why invade my privacy?

I don’t know if this is true of other companies but my company asks all kinds of intrusive questions and publishes this information to random people. For example, every time a direct report of mine wants to order an official taxi, s/he has to submit a form online (all our internal systems are automated). In that form, the person has to put in what kind of taxi, from where to where, etc. But the form also automatically (using employment records) adds several more pieces of information – e.g. the age. This information come to me every time. Why on earth do I need to be informed and continuously reminded of the age of my team members? Worse, this information + the person’s full title + employment band is sent to the Taxi company! So, if a taxi company wants to target someone for mischief, they can easily figure out which person probably has a higher net worth based on band and title. Wonderful! The taxi company knows your seniority, where you live, your home line, your mobile, etc.

What about safety, security, or even a bit of simple privacy?

Waste not... (or at least seggregate)

A detailed blog on waste...

Reading Time

I was at the Crossword bookstore yesterday, at Strands a couple days ago, at Blossom's a couple of weeks ago... None of the bookstores in Bangalore, it seems, cater to avid readers. Crossword was selling "A Thousand Shining Suns" and Alan Greenspans books as "new arrivals". Strands still had The World is Flat on display. Blossoms had nothing new worth reading. They seem to think that accounts of people graduating through IIMs make for literature. And why there is a sudden explosion of books on this topic is beyond me.
Cleary, I am not their target customer.
I go through at least one book a week, sometimes more. So I am stuck with re-reading old books I have. Also, these bookstores completely fail in exposing someone like me to new authors. You can't really go and browse in these stores in the hopes of finding something interesting to read.
Buying from Amazon costs a bundle -- not just the shipping to India, but also the price of the books themselves. The books that I buy cost 300-600 rupees, or $8-15. On Amazon, the same books are $17-$28. Plus if I want to save the shipping cost, I have to wait for continent-hopping friends to bring the books here.
The bookstores here don't stock the books I want to read, and nor do they offer any alternates that I find interesting. Some days I really miss Barnes and Noble. And Amazon.

Finally, it's over

Of course, I’m referring to the Democrats’ nomination for US Presidential Elections next year. Perhaps there is a lesson in all of this somewhere -- for the Dems to shrink the length of the whole process, to avoid apathy simply due to the seemingly never-ending process.

Generating new ideas - the Cisco way

Excerpt:

While innovation prizes can be a low-cost way to generate great ideas, they're also fraught with potential legal and HR headaches. Hsieh and Jouret wanted to ensure participants retained ownership of their ideas if they weren't chosen as the winner. They had other matters to consider, including making sure an idea truly belongs to the contestant and that a winner isn't found to be a convicted felon. So Cisco hammered out ways to prevent fraud and notified candidates that they'd have to go through background checks if they made it past the semifinals.

Not everything went according to Cisco's plan. Initially, the I-Prize site let contestants vote on each other's ideas, à la news-rating site Digg. But then executives discovered that some contestants were trying to game the system. So Cisco decided not to use the community voting mechanism to influence the selection of semifinalists and finalists.

The big challenge in some innovation competitions is making the prize difficult enough that real innovation can be achieved, but not so difficult that the prize can't be won. The larger the challenge, the more likely people will try and fail.

>> Read more:

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/may2008/tc20080529_968185.htm

 

 

A walk

http://xkcd.com/77/

Eating junk

NY Times just published an article on why monkeys and humans eat junk food.

“These results may not surprise any stressed-out wage slave
who has polished off a quart of Häagen-Dazs at midnight while contemplating the
day’s humiliations. But the experiment intrigues scientists studying human
junk-food binges, which are hard to understand because there are so many
confounding factors.”

“The stress seemed to affect snacking in different ways for
each sex. The women given solvable puzzles ate more grapes than M&Ms, while
the women under stress preferred M&Ms. The men ate more of the high-fat
snacks when they were not under stress, apparently because the ones who
got the easy anagrams had more time to relax and have a treat.”

Read more

We will not request the cars we need

In a brilliant move, the Bangalore powers that be have decided to engage in “commandeer vehicles in the national interest".  Read on.

http://in.news.yahoo.com/hindustantimes/20080509/r_t_ht_nl_politics/tnl-flaunt-your-car-get-it-snatched-b610e63.html

 

I love the language and sentiments expressed in the quotes.  They’re sufficiently archaic to be funny - as long as it’s not your car getting “commandeered”.

 

Ready to Rot

Tired of your furniture? Have you tried composting it?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/08/garden/08biodegrade.html

 

 

Microsoft's Woes

The problem with Microsoft is that it has a single strategy – ride on the back of Windows OS.  Ever since Bill Gates’ DOS ended up in the right place at the right time and got adopted by IBM for its PCs, the company has struggled to find its footing outside of operating systems and “hygiene” software.  Its Office Professional application suite took off only after it offered deep discounts to computer manufacturers (OEMs) and, in those days, assembler/resellers (VARs) for pre-installing the software on all systems sold. 

 

If you leave out forays into hardware (mouse, X-box), all other Microsoft software is sold on the basis of its linkage to Windows OS.  And, if anti-trust regulation limits the company’s ability to bundle in more software at deep discounts to its retail price, Microsoft is obviously left in a bind.

 

It hasn’t really figured out how to make a dent in other spaces.  The software remains woefully archaic, and the attempts to update it every 3 years only end up frustrating users who have finally managed to figure out how to get the software to do what they want it to do.  By the time your efficiency reaches an acceptable level, your IT department has been cajoled by deep discounts for early-adopters and mirages of future super-efficiency, to upgrade all users to Windows 2020.

 

In Excel, if you have to convert a number that has been designated as text (for what-ever reason) back into a number, you have to first type 1 in a new cell, then multiply the cell in question by this ‘1’.  If you are lucky the original cell will now recognize that its content is a number not text.  If you are unlucky, status quo will remain and you in frustration will re-type the content as a number. So, after 20 odd years of development investment into Excel, this is the best the thousands of researchers and programmers at Microsoft have come up with.

 

In today’s “collaborative” world, it is surprising that Microsoft hasn’t provided simple features to make people’s life easier.  Such as turning an email into a item on the calendar – in ONE step.  Or, easy-to-use annotation abilities in Excel (not cell by cell comments) for easy sharing of ideas among teams spread across continents.  The majority of corporate communicate today happens in PPT slides, but the annotation capabilities are pathetic.  The microscopic yellow tab can’t be seen without a strong lens… and you can’t circle something and put a comment around it.  Buying add-ons are not the answer since most corporate IS teams are on a crusade to surreptitiously remove all unauthorized software from corporate hard-drives.

 

And as for entering the Web 2.0 age, buying Yahoo is not the answer. Providing a Facebook-Youtube-whatever, suite of applications that corporate IS departments are not petrified of, is.

 

 

Mumbai street kid

A street kid in Mumbai who's apparently picked up the basics of several languages just by talking to tourists. Imagine what he could have accomplished if he got proper education and found a way to enter the mainstream society.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgJkjfG4hFU

Waste less, eat more

Several African countries and Sri Lanka have asked the Indian government for about 1million tons of food grain. It seems they are not asking for the grain free of charge, but they are asking the flow of grains to continue.

Recently the Indian government had banned exporting of food grains after the continued rise in prices. The diplomatic requests put us in a bind, given the hesitance of the government to risk further increase in prices in an election year. Additionally, the Indian government has recently made some friendly trade overtures to Africa in the hopes of strengthening relationships and counter-balancing China’s oil investments and trade.

It seems to me that the solution out of this bind is actually quite simple.

But before we go into that, let’s put the 1 million tons in context. India produced 227 million tons of food grain per year in FY08, of which about 140mt is rice. India has 13mt of rice stored with the Good Corp. of India and state warehouses. So the amount needed by Africa is less than 1% of total production of rice and about 8% of stored rice.

But about 10% of the grains produced in India are lost post-production: wheat 8%; rice 11%; pulses 9.5%; and all food grains, 9.3%. Most of this is lost due to poor storage – either the grain is not dried sufficiently before storage or because of lack of adequate storage facilities.

If we manage to reduce wastage even slightly from 11% to 10% of production it would be more than enough for what Africa needs. And if we reduced it further, we could even add more rice to India’s food supply.

So instead of traditional knee-jerk measures of banning exports changing the amount of grains stored in govt warehouses, if we invested in proper grain drying and storage facilities, we’d have more than enough for everyone – India and Africa, alike.

Add to that the remarks by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the "growing Indian and Chinese appetite is contributing to the global food crisis"… Tell me again, which country has the largest percent of overweight people on the planet? Jokes aside, probably what she meant to say is that millions of people slowly coming out of poverty is raising the demand for food, putting pressure on food prices. The US can no longer assume it can continue to consume the largest portions of the world's food and energy production. Progress made by developing countries will inevitably lead to less distorted consumption patterns around the world.

Sources for food production and waste data: CommodityOnline, UN Food and Agriculture Organization

Re-writing history

I was sitting in my high school class a few months after arriving in the US, when I suddenly realized that for the first time in my life I actually finding a history class interesting. History! Who knew, you could like history?

It occurred to me that just a few months before that, as part of my UP Board syllabus, I was busy memorizing a bunch of dates which I could still easily rattle off without any effort. 1776 Declaration of Independence. The war of 1812 with the British. The Boston Tea Party. And on and on. But this was different. We were discussing the pros and cons of a decision taken by General Lee during the American Civil War. Studying history could actually involve discussion…

The teacher even rented “Gone with the Wind” and discussed the historical setting of the movie. By that time I had just about managed to get the hang of American accent and I understood very little of the movie. But I could still appreciate what he was trying to teach us -- history is a matter of perspective; and it's about people, more often than not, ordinary people...

And years later, in Berkeley, one day I discovered Columbus Day was no longer observed as Columbus Day but Indigenous People’s Day… And it stopped being a holiday. That was also history in the making, or rather, re-making. We were rewriting history: the hero of my own high-school text books from only a few years ago was now a villain…

...

You’re probably wondering what’s the reason for this daydream about history. Well, I got an email the other day regarding a high-school reunion. If I was in the US, I would have certainly attended and if the history teacher is still there, said ‘thank you’!

What if...

A really funny post from a blog I follow. My favorites are Hitler looking up Invading Russia in Google search, and Gavrilo Princip's Facebook status: "Gavvy is in a murderous mood".

http://krishashok.wordpress.com/2008/04/30/help-i-am-a-hypowebiac/

Not quite doomsday yet

The doomsday predictors may not like it, but it seems the US economy actually grew last quarter.

The 0.6% sequential growth of real GDP corresponds to 2.5% YoY growth from March 2008 to March 2007. This 0.6% growth is higher than the US Fed’s own projections (made in Oct and revised down in Jan). To be fair, the Fed didn’t provide projections for growth by quarter (only annual), but if we interpolate the quarters through a simple straight-line approach, this quarter should have been flat – that is, 0% sequential growth. Caveat: We should keep in mind that the numbers released yesterday are “Advance” numbers. There are two more rounds of refinement to come: “Preliminary” and the “Final” estimates of GDP growth for last quarter.

The bad news: The US Fed is indicating that it expects a business-side spending slowdown as a risk. And inflationary pressures may finally be leading the Fed to putting a pause to recent rate cuts. So the doomsday people may still have a chance to rejoice later in the year :)

Destroying brand new cars

It seems that Mazda (owned by Ford) decided to destroy roughly $100M worth of cars after a rather odd event during transport. They weren’t sure exactly what damage had been caused to the cars and decided to destroy them rather than risk having to pay consumer claims for unknown problems later on.

What is interesting is how economic considerations have driven a rather ethical sounding outcome. Of course, the environmentalists among us will question whether they should have pushed for greater re-use instead of destruction. For example, they blew up the sturdy air-bags instead of dismantling them for reuse. Or perhaps it was not possible to pull them out intact. Or charity-minded folks might feel that they should have donated these potentially-defective cars to some charity.

What interested me in the story was the fact that the company took a bold, and probably internally unpopular, decision.

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB120942873506551291.html?mod=blog

What gives us our individuality?

Going beyond the “nature vs nurture” dialogues, scientists are now studying identical clones to understand what gives us our individuality, in other words, our unique responses to the situations the world throws at us, or we create for ourselves.

So what makes us individuals? Perhaps just the random variations embedded in our cells...

Link

Pork barrel scheme, literally

Here's one from Canada. The Canadian government is offering farmers $50M to kill 150,000 pigs without letting the pork enter the human food supply. This amounts to 10% of the total size of pig herds. The goal: to arrest the decline in pork prices. Link.

Human eye versus the CCD camera

I was standing on the top of the 8 foot solid concrete ceiling of the linear accelerator. My advisor excitedly looked through the pipe into the accelerator “cave” below. He looked back at us smiling, “I can see it with the naked eye”! What he saw was radiation emitted by an electron beam when it passed through a thin film. The human eye can detect almost single photons of light! I looked through the pipe as well and could clearly see the purplish white light coming from the thin film.

I was quite intrigued. I had never thought about how sensitive the human eye really is. We had two very expensive Charge Coupled Device (CCD) camera. In those days, digital cameras had not become consumer technology. And in any case, we were using one with high sensitivity, designed for scientific applications. At $25K a pop, weighing several pounds and liquid cooled, it wasn’t quite what you’d carry in your pocket to snap a picture the Grand Canyon. It was the most sensitive camera you could buy on a reasonable lab budget. And yet it was less sensitive than the human eye. And of course, cameras have a hard time matching the dynamic range of an eye.

My advisor’s comment got me thinking about how all our technology doesn’t even come close to mimicking the functions of an animal or human body. Robotic dogs, pneumatic hands, etc. all only estimate some aspects of behavior of natural bodies.

These were pre-Google days and though Alta Vista existed, just because I had a sudden interest in the sensitivity levels of the human eye, I couldn’t expect to find a gigabytes of layman-level information on the human eye just by searching for it on the internet.

Evolution of the eye is a topic that has been hotly debated because of how complex the eye is: So many different functions and muscles had to evolve to give us a functioning eye.

Last year, Edge, a forum which brings together the world’s leading scientists and thinkers, published the transcript of a series of dialogues on evolution of life. What I liked about the series is that it was conducted in the form of a round-table. In each session, one scientist presents his views and the others chime in at various points to raise questions or emphasize some points. So instead of a boring highly structured monologue, we read through a discussion in the form a train of thought. Link.

Marketing research, of sorts

We've all seen ads depicting skimpily clad women draped over cars. Stanford researchers set out to scientifically test whether “the irrelevant image of an alluring female posing by the merchandise (can) actually encourage a heterosexual man to purchase it?"

They showed men erotic images and then asked them to bet either 10 cents or a dollar on a bet with a 50/50 chance of winning.

Their conclusion? After seeing the pictures, the men were more likely to gample a full dollar more often. Well we knew this all along, but now we have scientific proof :)

Read full article

Another way to conserve water?

Siva will appreciate this post the most, given his obsession with potable water. Apparently, UPenn researchers have tried to test the benefit of drinking 8 glasses of water a day.

Somewhere along the line you’ve probably heard that you should drink eight glasses of water a day. It’s supposed to make your skin supple, keep your organs flush and help you avoid overeating. Now doctors from the University of Pennsylvania say that’s hogwash. After exploring the health effects of hydration, they conclude that the purported benefits of drinking lots of water are not backed by any solid evidence—or liquid evidence, either. The physicians present their findings in the June issue of the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.

From SciAm

Corporate gifts, served Panchtantra style

In response to my previous post, one reader asked: “Okay, so fake leather isn’t right for women, nor the polo shirts for guys – but what would be the right present?”

I think USB sticks make great gifts these days as everybody keeps losing them. They should have just picked a more unisex style instead of one that was permanently embedded in Terminator style leather. Business card holders are useful – everyone needs them anyway; but again a unisex design is important. And if you are thoughtful enough to get something with elegant ‘green’ packaging you get extra bonus points.

These discussions about appropriateness of gifts have reminded me of a Panchtantra story I had read as a kid. It is a common story that most Indians have learned in school (at least, people my age).

There are two friends – a crow and a crane. One day the crane invites the crow for dinner at his home. He serves a delicious porridge in a ‘surahi’, a narrow necked earthen pot. While the crane thoroughly enjoys the meal, the crow’s short beak can’t reach the porridge in the pot. He is forced to eat the crumbs spilled by the crane.

The crow doesn’t say anything but in turn invites the crane for dinner. And he serves the meal in a flat ‘thali’. Of course, this time the crane doesn't get much to eat and he soon realizes his mistake.

So taking a cue from the Panchtantra tale: Next time I’m in-charge of corporate gifts, maybe I’ll distribute silk blouses with embroidered company logo to all. :)

Corporate Gifts

I’ve been thinking: How come so much of what I observe and write about is related to my experience as a woman, rather than as a human being. Surprisingly, this wasn’t a topic that was even remotely top of mind for me while I was in the US. It seems to me that living in India, you get rubbed the wrong way at least once (if you are lucky) or more, every-single-day. And after 3.5 years of this, I’ve just had enough. With that preamble, let’s pick a non-India example for a change :).

On Friday, I gave a talk to a bunch of 20 students and 2 profs from an MBA school in the US. Any B-school class studying emerging markets end up studying India, and ends up visiting us as one of the interesting companies to profile. So, inevitably, we end up hosting quite a few such student groups. So, back to the presentation on Friday...

I spent over an hour talking to the students about the company, India, its economy, etc. At the end of it, one of the students got up and, on behalf of the class, presented a gift. This practice of giving a gift is rare and not followed by all visiting groups because of restrictions on corporate gifts, especially the value of it, which they keep below $25-50. In any case, upon opening it I found a USB stick keychain and a money clip. Both of these are made in a bulky style, of heavy leather with bold stitching in a very male style to say the least. It’s something that Arnold Shwarzenegger would have carried as the Terminator (in the first of the movie trilogy), if he’d wanted to seem stylish. Believe me, I don’t mind leather, but no woman would carry anything of this style by choice.

So, why is a business school, in the year 2008, assuming that this is an appropriate gift for a woman? If in their defense they say, well, we didn’t know that we’d be giving this to a woman – well then, why are they assuming that there won’t encounter any women presenters? Sure, the number of senior women in business is low, but it is not zero!

Thoughtlessness is very off-putting.

The same goes for all kinds of corporate gifts and paraphernalia: it is all designed for men. Two years ago, I was responsible for organizing an annual meeting for roughly 100 senior leaders of the company. It had been customary for my department to give out polo-shirts for all participants. I had received one such shirt the previous year. As with all corporate-wear, this stuff is designed for men; I have never seen a woman wear a company-logo shirt in this company or previous ones. Since no other alternative was available, I decided against giving out any shirts. When an attendee inquired about the missing polo-shirts, I told him that when the company starts stocking shirts appropriate for women also, I’d be glad to give them out. :)

"Can Money Make You Happy?"

The answer seems to be "YES". The catch? You have to spend it on others. So claim a recent study by researchers at the University of British Columbia.

As part of the study, U.B.C. psychologists gave volunteers a wad of cash to spend; half of them were told to splurge on themselves and the other half to spend it on others. The givers rated themselves as being happier, on average, than the self-spenders. The findings mesh with those of a Harvard B-school survey of 16 people who were asked to measure their happiness before and after receiving cash bonuses. Those who spent more of their loot on others rated themselves as happier than their co-workers who had failed to spread the wealth. "These findings suggest that very minor alterations in spending allocations, as little as $5," says study author and U.B.C. psychologist Elizabeth Dunn, "may be enough to produce real gains in happiness on a given day."

Read SciAm blurb

Pay for Performance, in School

‘When the rewards were handed out, [Manhattan fourth grader] Jazmin Roman was eager to celebrate her $39.72. She whispered to her friend Abigail Ortega, “How much did you get?” Abigail mouthed a barely audible answer: $36.87. Edgar Berlanga pumped his fist in the air to celebrate his $34.50.’

These children had just been awarded real money for better grades. Now, before we jump to take a stand on either side of whether it is ok to pay for grades, let’s take a moment to consider.

First, let’s assume that paying students for performance actually works – in the sense that it gets them to pay attention to learning and get better grades. If so, is this approach of paying for better grades necessarily wrong?

We can say that it is plain morally wrong to reward performance with pay. It will distort the children’s value systems. But isn’t this (getting more pay only if we perform to our employer’s requirements) what we have to live with for the rest of our adult lives? So why is it wrong to do it when we’re young but ok when we’re old?

We can claim that it will lead to students not learning to value education in and of itself. But let’s face it: Even most parents talking about giving their children a good education, want to do it so that the children will fare well in life, that is, find a good job/career and make lots of money. So they are seeing education as a means to an end (involving loads of money at the end of it).

Societies, when they talk about valuing education, want an educated populace because only then can the economy grow and prosper. Again, it’s about the money. And again, the reward mechanism for the society is money.

In every human profession, except probably pure science research (though even that is becoming highly commercialized – e.g. biotech), the reward for performance is money. So let’s not be hypocritical and claim that it is morally wrong.

However there is one argument that is harder to defeat. And that is, that there is some value to learning for learning’s sake.

Yet, there are only a few people who get a kick out of learning, of knowing, of being the best at something – for its own sake. And most likely, these people who are already inclined towards real learning won’t be adversely affected just because someone pays them every time they to do accomplish something. Those who needed an extra push, might learn for the money. And finally, the completely unredeemable – well, we’ve lost nothing by trying.

Or perhaps we could claim that it is ok as an adult to get money for performance but not as a child. So are we expecting children to be wiser than adults, by learning for learning’s sake, and adults to be more driven by such “superficial” things as money?

I remember one incident – probably I was in class 6 or 7. I had a particularly good math teacher. One day in trigonometry, he taught us how to calculate the height of a tree, given the angle to the tree-top and the distance to its base, and assigned several homework problems. The next day in class he solved a few of them for us, ones that involved two trees (one behind the other) instead of just one.

At the end of the class, to everyone’s surprise, he made a bet with us: Any student who could solve the next problem by the end of lunch session would get two rupees as a prize. Two rupees was not a huge sum even in 1980s, but to us kids, a test based on money was a novelty. We all got our notebooks and pencils ready. He wrote a problem with two trees on the black board and the class ended. And during the break that followed we all worked on the problem. I worked out the answer and turned in my notebook, just as all children had. But somehow it didn’t feel right. Then I got it: This was a 3-dimensional problem. One of the trees was on the other side of the river. So I ran to the teachers’ desk, got my notebook back, and re-did the solution. I still remember my friend Ritika hovering around me to finish so that she could put the notebook on the desk before time was up :).

The next day I was the proud recipient of a crisp new two rupee note tucked inside a book of logarithms. I still remember that I couldn’t pay attention to any other classes the rest of the day. My mind kept wandering to the slim logarithms book signed by Mr. Raman (the teacher) and the crisp two rupee note.

Did that experience of being paid for solving the problem make me expect that I’d be paid every time I solved a class problem? No. Did it turn me off of math? No. Did it corrupt me for life? I don’t think so .

If he had rewarded us with money every day instead of just once in a year, would the answers be different? I doubt it. After all, most companies pay for performance these days. Does it make every employee their job less? Not that I can see.

Though this is a dataset of one , I think value systems of people are not formed by being rewarded for better grades or not. They are formed by watching how adults around us act and behave. Children are quite perceptive. And I doubt that paying them for good grades would harm them for life. At worst, it will be ineffective. It might actually give them a better understanding of financial management – in fact, I hope the teachers use this as an opportunity. At best, it will help those who need the extra push to perform better.

Read NYT Article

“Go left, left, left, left”

So far I’ve been driving in India on the basis on of international driving license. I had decided to get an Indian license and a few months ago I just about managed to obtain a learning permit. That is an entertaining story in itself – but for another time.

So my status as of a couple of weeks ago was that I had an Indian “Learning License”. I had gone through a driving school to obtain this. The school was charging me money just for the process without doing any training. Given the large number of people with international licenses who’ve landed up in Bangalore, the schools have recognized a good opportunity and even have standard rate cards for this service.

As the learning license was nearing the end of its validity, I decided that I cannot procrastinate any further and must face the bureaucracy to get a proper Driving License.

My previous experience with the Regional Transport Office, the agency that grants these licenses had been rather stressful to say the least. So, with much trepidation and reluctance, I called up Manjunath at the same driving school that helped me get the learning license. He asked me to deliver the Learning License and a photo to his office, and tells me to show up at 9am on Saturday at the RTO.

Suffering from the punctuality disease, I show up exactly at 9:00am on the dot at the RTO office on 2nd floor, having parked my car outside. Upon arrival, I called Manjunath who informed me that he would be there in “10 minutes”. Tired of waiting after 20 minutes, I had decided to sit in one of the 25 bright red chairs arranged (or rather, bolted) in 5 neat rows in front of the inner office. Some guy who seemed he was an official asked me “DL or LL?”

It took me a moment to realize what the initials stood for and I blurted out “LL”. Quickly realizing my mistake I said “DL. DL!” He waved his hand -- Swallowing my pride, I looked hopelessly at him, trying to decipher the meaning of the hand-wave. He made me get up from the seat: the seats were for men only. No I am not kidding! The seats represented the men’s line. The women’s line had no seats – standing only.

Another 20 minutes later I spotted Habib from my driving school. More hand-waving occurred, which I interpreted to mean “Wait”. A few minutes later, I had signed some forms and was standing in a line.
Soon I found myself in the office of the same official who had uprooted me from the men’s chairs reviewed my forms, gave them back to me with a stamp and again waved me away!

Determined to not be hand-waved away this time, I asked him in Hindi where I am supposed to go next. He impatiently muttered something and pointed me to the door. Oh well, so much for my pride…

Outside I found a bunch of men and women carrying forms with the same yellow sleeve which identified them as customers of the same driving school as mine. So I decided to wait near them. When Manjunath approached, defying hand-waving norms, I deliberately voiced my question: “what’s happening? Where is the test going to happen”. He told me to go wait downstairs near the road. 15 minutes later he shows up again. On asking, I was told to drive my car to the Post Office road for the test.

I followed the directions and ended up at a street where some 15 men were waiting. I was the only woman there. After 15 minutes,, like a flock of birds taking off together, they all start walking in one direction. I followed them. It turned out we were standing at slightly wrong corner. I re-park and wait again.

Finally I spot both Manjunath and Habib. I run over and demand that they tell me properly what is going to happen. Don’t just tell me to wait or the next micro-step in the process. Who is going to show up? When/where is the test going to take place. Etc. For the first time I get two complete sentences in response . Somewhat mollified, I wait for the next step.

Like Moses parting the red sea, a group of cars bringing the Test Takers (don’t know what else to call them) cut through the throng of waiting legal-drivers-to-be. I wait.

Manjunath asks me to drive to a certain point where the Test Taker is standing on the side of the road. He takes my papers. Tells me to go make a round and come back. I was expecting him to get into the car so I hesitate. He repeats in English: “Go left, left, left, left. Come back.”

I smile to myself and take off, obediently making left, left, left, left and returning to the spot in question.

Before I can even come to a full stop near him, the Test Taker shouts, waving his hands “Go! Go home!”, at which I promptly take off.

Ah, but the story didn’t end. When I called up the driving school to pick up the license, they say I haven’t taken a photograph. He accuses me of running off after the previous weekend’s test instead of going for a photograph. I exclaim that despite my repeatedly asking them, they had told me nothing about going back for a photograph; Habib had told me to go home after the test. He muttered something about a “card license”. Exasperated, I went back the following weekend, got the photograph done. Putting two-and-two together, I figured out that the “card” license which fits in a wallet has a computerized production process, and therefore, they needed a digital photo instead of the print photo submitted during my previous visit.

Oh well, now I’m keeping my fingers crossed – I’ve gotten the driver’s license but the birthdate is wrong. I don’t think I have it in me to get it corrected. I’ll simply be a day older in anything requiring a driving license proof.

My strategic breakfast

It seems these days everything has become strategic. If a salesperson makes a sale, it is strategic. If a programmer write a code, it will be strategic code. So I figured why not a strategic breakfast, or a strategic drive to the office, or better yet, strategic breathing.

So many people use the word strategic incorrectly that it has almost lost its meaning.

The two most common mistakes are:

1. Confusing strategy with objective: Strategy is an approach, not the objective. "My strategy is to be the #1 company" is an objective, not a strategy.

2. Confusing strategy with an obvious thing a company/person must do. Claiming that "my strategy is to grow revenues and profits" is like saying "my strategy is to breathe." Strategy involves making a trade-off, choosing one option over many others. If your strategy is not debatable, it is probably not really a strategy.

A good corporate strategy is one that is actionable, that is proactive, that is dynamic in its response to changing market conditions.

A couple of weeks ago, after listening to a young IIM grad talk about adding value through end-to-end strategic leverage of synergy, I asked him to stop and use words and their meaning which would have appeared in the Oxford dictionary of twenty years ago.

Why do our business schools teach students to talk in such a meaningless way? Recently I interviewed quite a few candidates to fill positions in my group. Anyone using meaningless language got asked a couple of times to "be more specific" or "give examples". If the person insisted on using "strategic"/"value"/"leverage" on the average of one or more per sentence, s/he was sure to be dropped from my short-list.

So, No, Thanks! I won't be having a strategic breakfast anytime soon.

In search of the Higgs

Today, Ravi pointed me to an article in the National Geographic about the Large Hadron Collider. It is very well written, an enjoyable read yet (mostly) accurate. It is full of funny analogies. I think popular science writing has come of age in recent years. It was not so long ago when popular science articles were either completely incomprehensible or simplied so much that they were almost completely wrong.

I remember when I was preparing my "talk" -- the talk about my dissetation -- I looked at other people's talks. Most of them were impossible to understand and full of complicated equations.

The reason I love physics is that it is intuitive, once you get the basic concepts. You hardly have to memorize anything and can simply think through and derive the answer. But there are very few physicists who can do this well. I was lucky enough to have some very good scientists and professors to learn from. Slowly I came to believe that whatever I do I should be able to explain it to the "general public" in a simple to comprehend way. Granted that everyone will not be able to follow the esoterics of any advanced research, but most people can (and do) follow the basics when explained properly.

So I prepared my talk, which was actually a PPT, with simple language and structure. I used a lot of graphics, spending hours with Microsoft tools. Once I gave this talk at a company where I had applied for a job. One of the people in the audience told me afterwards about how surprised he was that he could follow it all along. Most other applicants who talked about their Ph.D.s and masters projects it seems gave incomprehensible talks to their future bosses.

Coming back to popular science writing, I think it has come of age in recent years. When I was looking for a job I actually considered entering this field, being a science journalist of sorts. I suspect others who felt like I did entered the field and helped change it over time.

With all this ado, we come to the article that Ravi pointed me to. First, a couple of funny exerpts.

"Some U.S. money has gone into the LHC [the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Geneva], which will cost billions of dollars: five, maybe ten—the exact number is elusive (the science will be precise, but the accounting apparently follows the Uncertainty Principle)."

"Building a contraption like the LHC to find the Higgs [particle] is a bit like embarking on a career as a stand-up comic with the hope that at some point in your career you'll happen to blurt out a joke that's not only side-splittingly funny but also a palindrome."

I laughed out loud when I read these. But however witty, the analogy in the second para is not accurate because what you are looking for (the Higgs particle) is not detected directly but only through other (unique) by-products it creates after it comes into existence for a tiny fraction of a second. Maybe it is more like smelling, while blindfolded, a football stadium full of shirts, to identify the one that is yours.

The article is really entertaining (and mostly accurate).
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/03/god-particle/achenbach-text

Do you have CEO-ready hair?

This Saturday’s Mint newspaper had a feature on women’s dressing. Looking at the pictures of the women CEOs/leaders featured, you would notice one other stark fact – the length and style of their hair, which Siva calls the Indra Nooyi hair style.

So I decided to check what % of top women have this hairstyle. You’d be quite surprised. For this calculation, I took the 50 Most Powerful Women list published by Fortune Magazine. I rated their hair length as very short, shoulder length, just below shoulder, 7-8 inches below the shoulder, and very long.

In fact, Indra Nooyi was ranked the most powerful woman by Fortune (see photo).


The results?

Very short (like men’s): 58%
Shoulder length: 28%
3-5 inches below shoulder: 10%
7-8 inches below shoulder: 4%
Longer: 0%

Two other features were noticeable. If you look at the same distribution for women in the top 10, the results are even more skewed.

Top 10:
60%, 30%, 10%, 0%, 0%

Top 5:
100%, 0%, 0%, 0%, 0%

And, only two of these 50 women had a feminine hairstyle, only one with prominent curls.

Makes you wonder: Do successful women have very short hair cuts because they are successful and presumably don’t have the time or patience to deal with anything longer? Or, to get to the top they had to project an image that people normally associate with leaders?

I guess with my unruly curly long hair, I might as well drop any ideas of being a CEO :)

Glass ceiling surveys

Recently I came across a survey being conducted jointly by IIM Ahmedabad and NASSCOM on women in leadership. I was very disappointed with the survey.

1. It is poorly designed in terms of being able to do proper statistical analysis because the responses are just y/n. You just have to state how good/bad it is.
2. Many questions are leading questions.
3. And worse, many questions are not about the organization but the respondents beliefs, “Personal inhibitions within women prevent them from reaching leadership positions.”
4. And you can’t state whether you consider the criteria even important or not. For example you can only state whether the org encourages “Motivational talks and workshops by senior women” or “Self development”, and whether they are good or not. Whether I think they are useful or important is not asked for any questions/criteria.

The whole thing looks like a survey designed by a student for a class project, not by ‘top’ institutions and associations.

That’s the problem with most gender research. It is, I’m sorry to say, all very silly – the way it is designed and therefore the results it shows. And none of them get to the bottom of the real issues faced by people.

What all these people forget is that just because we are women, we are not necessarily all the same. Who would go about doing a men’s survey, asking them if the org has a “Retiring room for women”. Perhaps such a thing is needed during pregnancy – but then why not ask a more specific question – what are the things you need at work during pregnancy. Are you getting them? Why ask non-pregnant women about a retiring room, but not men? Why should only women need flexibility in work hours and not men? It is all so silly.

Women are after all people, just as men are people. What organizations need to assess, and understand, is whether they are able to meet the different needs of their employees. Some employees (men and women) will have young children to care for, some will have elderly parents. Some will want to have ‘fun at work’ while others just want to work and spend time with non-work friends. Some need motivational talks, some don’t. So why assume just because I am a woman, I need a special retiring room, motivational talks, self-development?

I do think that “motivational talks by senior women” can help, for those who need them. But you can’t just pick any senior-level woman and try to get her to motivate others. Being a senior woman doesn’t automatically grant you motivational powers (same goes for men).

Women after all make up 50% of any population (well, lower in many states in India…but regardless). 50% is a huge %. We can’t all have the same needs and different in the same way from some preconceived notion of an average man.

In my experience, all my frustrations at work have been because I want/expect different things than most people and not because of my womanly needs (whatever they are). I want flex-time because spending hours a day in traffic zaps any energy and thinking ability out of my head. I want to be able to work from home on some days, because I want to be able to run an errand and work the rest of the day. I want people to not set up meetings after normal business hours because I can’t be on a company bus after the roads become full of smog/pollution and cause incessant coughing. If the company makes me stay late at work, I want it to pay for my taxi home. If I travel for business and want to take a convenient personal detour, I want it to allow me to pay for the detour, not force me to either make the whole trip personal or business. And I want the company to treat me as a responsible adult, not a wayward 12-year old.

Wouldn’t men want this stuff too?

Standard of Living

Recent research shows that while the top 20% of people in terms of income, own 50% of US wealth, their per-capita spend is only 2.1x of the bottom. Interesting read. The one question this piece doesn't cover though is how much of that spend is on credit. I think leaving that out will give a more accurate picture of the real sustainable standards of living of the various segments of population.

NYT: You Are What You Spend

How to avoid accountability

2 of the only 3 US senators who abstained from voting one way or the other on the US economic stimulus package were, who else: Barak Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Voting “yes” were 46 Democratic senators, 33 Republicans and the Senate’s 2 independents. Sixteen Republicans voted “no.” Three Democrats did not vote: Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama, who are campaigning for the presidency, and Ben Nelson of Nebraska.

NYT: $168B Stimulus Plan

The Green Apple

New ultra-thin Apple MacBook Air boasts of significant reduction in materials bad for the environment.

* Less brominated flame retardants (BFRs)
* Less polyvinyl chloride (PVC)
* Recyclabe aluminum enclosure
* Apple's first mercury-free LCD with arsenic-free glass

All this in a laptop that can be carried in a large paper envelope.

The 10% myth

We all know about the common claim that most people use only 10% of their brain. Here's a study that says that during a day a normal person would end up using 100% of the functions of the brain. Yet, it doesn't answer the spirit of the question, which wasn't whether we use 100% of the functions (regions) of the brain, but rather do we use our brains to the fullest.

It sill makes for an interesting read: SciAm 10%

What I have been wondering about is whether our brains have been undergoing evolutionary changes as the population have moved from agricultural labor to sitting at a desk all day typing away bits of information. Have our finger control systems become more nimble, and at the expense of what?

'Now you never see plastic'

Ireland instituted a 33 cent tax on plastic bags at stores, back in 2002. In the years since then, plastic bags have virtually disappeared. It helps that Ireland doesn't have a plastic bags industry. But it is still heartening to see that it is possible to get rid of them.

In 2002, Ireland passed a tax on plastic bags; customers who want them must now pay 33 cents per bag at the register. There was an advertising awareness campaign. And then something happened that was bigger than the sum of these parts.
Within weeks, plastic bag use dropped 94 percent. Within a year, nearly everyone had bought reusable cloth bags, keeping them in offices and in the backs of cars. Plastic bags were not outlawed, but carrying them became socially unacceptable — on a par with wearing a fur coat or not cleaning up after one’s dog.

Read more at NYT

DNA Graffiti

For the first post on this blog, let's start with something fun -- DNA graffitti. The following excerpt from Scientific American speaks for itself.

When genomics pioneer Craig Venter announced last week that his team had constructed the first man-made bacterial genome, he disclosed that researchers had embedded five "watermarks" in the DNA containing coded messages. The "code" was simply the genetic code, in which the order of DNA subunits specifies a sequence of amino acids, each abbreviated by a letter. Wired Science recruited researchers not involved in the study to decode the messages, which were VENTERINSTITVTE (there is no amino acid for "U"), CRAIGVENTER, HAMSMITH, CINDIANDCLYDE and GLASSANDCLYDE. The latter three biograffiti seem to refer to Venter's co-authors Hamilton Smith, John Glass and Clyde Hutchison. (Wired Science; Science)

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=news-bytes-mystery-illness-strikes-bats&page=1