Random Thoughts

The Party

2007-12-18T08:39:00.000-08:00

It is an amazing evening with everyone who is someone attending the grandest party of the year. In this party the hostess will unveil her latest creation. Many eminent personalities of the trade are present and so are the critics.
The excitement has reached its pinnacle as this exquisite piece of art is finally exposed to all the attendees. Let’s hear what people really think about this work.
“Oh darling this is a great piece, you must certainly get an award for this. However, you should have used some more color on top and bottom.” This came from someone whose only creation till date went totally black soon after one hell of drunken inaugural party.
“This is no match for my entry this year”. Many agree; his rings do have a compelling twist that this smaller piece fails to match.
“She needs to work on her basics; she failed to create a perfect shape. Of course it requires a lot of practice to create a perfect sphere.”
“The landscapes are quite good actually and I can see many variations on that too.”
“Too much of the blue stuff, if you ask me.”
“What was the price again?”
“I heard she has already sold it to the Life Corporation.”
“What did she name it anyways?”
“She calls it Earth, even the name is obscure. My Saturn piece will win the Universe Award hands down.”

Decisions... Decisions.. Decisions...

2007-11-04T11:25:00.000-08:00

I was discussing with a friend on how we generally make decisions and how our impressions about someone or something influences those decisions. We then dwelled on the issue of intuition and its role in the decisions we make. Here are my thoughts regarding these high complex topics.

Given a choice one can either base their decisions on information such as knowledge, facts, hunches, advice etc. or, incase of the fools and the brave-hearted, can just pick a totally random choice. Basically, if we take a scale of information taken by people to make any decision the scale starts from zero and tends towards hundred percent. All decisions thus are based on some level of information and rest is faith that they will be able to deal with the outcome of that decision.

As far as I can say from my personal experience, most of the decisions are based on half knowledge and I am willing to bet that the quantum of all decisions made personally over time or the entire population on any point of time, on this scale of information available, will make a normal curve. Let us now focus on whatever knowledge we do rely on, leaving the random faith for later.

With a certain level of confidence, I can speculate that most humans base the future outcome of a decision on the results of their past decisions or knowledge of other past decisions. Taking primary information about anyone or thing or event at any point in time as a point on the time scale and the past outcomes primary and secondary information as other points on the same scale, we tend to find a pattern, which when aware we term as experience and when not we call hunch. This pattern when extrapolated may give us points that we consider to be intuitions, when successful on hindsight and gladly forget in case of a miss.

A case in point is the first impressions that we make of anyone we meet. The quantum of information that goes to make the impression contains more body language than the spoken ones from the person, but that’s just a few points in the graph. The decision that we term as impression is primarily based of our beliefs on the perceived information which have overtime made a pattern on our minds. So if the current perception lies on a trend line we make an impression on the person. Of course, this is difficult to do with just one data point about, so we hold our decision on the person till the time we have gathered enough data points to satisfy ourselves that they fall on a certain trend. Since, we are generally in a hurry to make the impression decision, we subliminally rush into the decision and then try finding data points that confirms to our beliefs and reject those that may be seen as outliers to the pattern. This of course leads to wrong decisions/impressions that the counter party has to work very hard to deviate from.

Taking this information and pattern recognition as the basis for the knowledge based decisions; we can now look at the faith aspect, before dissecting the information part further (Let me keep that for next post). It is my belief that the randomness and faith is closely linked to the risk taking ability of the individual. How much are we ready to risk our decision’s outcome on the available information is what gives the drive to actually go ahead and make the decision. Each individual’s risk taking ability to varies from time to time and on per event basis, however they too follow a certain normalized curve, which indicates a certain consistency of behavior.

View too much arbitary thoughts...Rest for later...

I Think Therefore I Am

2007-01-06T22:18:00.000-08:00

Ok, I know this statement by Descarte is cliche (how do I get the phonetics symbol for e ??), but I am trying to build storyline that deals a lot with the origin of thought.

My life has suddenly become very hectic (not that it was not so in the past months, after I joined for MBA, but that it is the job hunting season now), so this story will develop painfully slowly. But, you know what they say, The fruit of patience is very sweet; (do not ask who are 'they' as I have no idea, thats just a thought... where do these thoughts come from... that's a good thought!!)

So if you are wondering what this story is gonna be... keep thinking and wait, and while you do that send in some comments on your interpretation of the question "Where do thoughts come from"

Along came Pollanians

2006-12-23T21:34:00.000-08:00

One fine day the world woke to find their greatest question being answered. We were not alone in the universe after all. However, there was no invasion like the movies generally depicted. It was more like their ambassador contacting Earth governments and asking for trade opportunities.

So what did this space travelling race from light-years away want to trade in. What else, it was the teleportation device technology. The Earth governments were perplexed and decided to join forces in light of this new revelation.

Things happened very quickly, too quickly for some smaller governments. The UN was given more power and a new body UNCETT (United Nations Council for Extra Terrestrial Trade) was formed for all trade with the aliens. The earth security was increased primarily to check any illegal trade between any government and the aliens. A world army UEF (United Earth Forces) was initiated and very quickly it absorbed a major portion of the unemployed population.

UNCETT decided to negotiate trade in such way that it retained the technology and sold the device on per unit basis. This also meant establishing service department that would go to the alien planet for installation and servicing. An agreement on the IP protection was reached with these good hearted aliens. In return the Pollanians gave us the hyper space drives, which we started incorporating in our space ships. They also provided us the map of all known inhabited planets and allowed us to enter the trade federation of planets.

Our confinement to Earth had finally ended and the teleportation device became our claim to fame in the galaxian community. A new saga for Earth had started as the tryst with the teleportation invention ended.

The Disappearing Act

2006-12-16T21:40:00.000-08:00

Back to the teleportation story. So where were we... Ahh! the Chinese scandal.

It did not require the best scientific brains to deduce what had happened. China had converted the teleportation technology to a weapon, which could instantly disintegrate human molecules and vaporize them. It was the teleportation machine without the other part that reintegrated the molecules. This delighted many individuals like those of the Mafia who now found a way to make bodies disappear without a trace. Many however did not like the idea and there was extensive debate over this issue leading to sanctions against China which was already in deep trouble after the collapse of it manufacturing economy.

While the tension in world politics was escalating towards another world war, people did find some good use of the technology. The best rated one was the instant delivery of piping hot Pizza that outdated the 30 minute delivery paradigm. The second best was the use of the technology for the building of the International Space Station and the Moon base. Work towards linking Mars was also underway. Although human teleportation research was banned there was a significant improvement in that area, thanks to the secretly funded research by most of world governments. This was put to use, again secretly, in sending people to the Moon base.

The world was still trying to keep pace with this technology which now was infiltrating all aspect of life. Recently it was also modified to produce energy from garbage and thus there was a positive impact on the environment. However, all such acheivements translated to loss of jobs and this meant trouble. For some strategists war seemed to be a way to control the public unrest (create jobs and reduce population... Is this the Broken Window Fallacy or what?).

Before the world could decide to fight out its problems another amazing thing happened......

Will Trust You in Another World

2006-12-14T22:24:00.000-08:00

This is going to be my first diversion from the regular teleportation story. A crazy thought came to my mind which deserves to be transfered to this extension of my mind.

Why do people trust others when they are transacting in web through say eBay? The answer is that each user gets a trust rating and since the user wants to continue to trade on the site the cost of losing the trust rating is high and thus the probability of default is less. This concept comes directly from the Game Theory's multiple turn games and is also the basis of the Credit ratings given to stocks and bonds. By making the ratings visible to everyone the information asymmetry is removed and there in lies the key to doubtless transactions.

So why don't we have such a thing in real life? We spend so much time to build trust with each person and this does percolates in some ways through our reputation, but in this process we tend to forgo business that does not come through a reliable route. There is thus a huge cost of building the trust and also huge losses in terms of the opportunity cost. So do we have a solution to this problem...

The first thing I thought of was a bit crazy. Why not have internet linked spectacles that can take a facial photograph of whoever we interact with and maps the facial characteristics to search for the individual's profile on the net and then bring out the trust rating on the spectacle screen such that we can see the rating beside the person. This will also solve the problem of remembering the names of everyone we meet. Can this be done? Well, why not? For all we know someone in Google might be working on this already. Then I wondered whether there is any solution which is more likely to happen.

I had recently come across this radically new concept called Second Life. In this world people can take avatars and do whatever they want. But when I looked outside the context of the game, I found the potential of this technology to be phenomenal. For starters, everyone who wants to do any transaction in real life can actually do it in this environment rather than face to face and apart from reducing travel cost can also gain complete information on the individual. It would be better if instead of avatars real time faces and their expressions can be projected to increase the tacit communication through this medium. I will be giving somemore of my thoughts regarding the Second Life technology in th future blogs.

All Set.... Energize

2006-12-06T20:16:00.000-08:00

I tried to think of many titles for my continuation blog on the teleportation saga but due to sudden scarcity of creativity ended up with what Capt. Jean Luc Picard of Star Trek TNG said before getting teleported. Here is the second episode...

Manufacturing industry was badly hit by this invention and some said that even agriculture would be unnecessary. However, using the technology for production instead of plain transportatition was only feasible for high value items and thus the agriculture and commodity industries survived. Biggest hit was China, which being the world's largest manufacturer of durables and consumer electronics had a serious problem in hand with its huge population.

Before we look at the consequences, let us see other aspects of changes that this technology had brought....
The human teleportation was not perfected yet. It turned out that people came out of it without any IQ. This was taken by all the religious groups as being the sign of existence of the soul. The favourite line of all religious leaders was "You can replicate the body, but not the soul". All research in Human Teleportation was banned much to the relief of the Vehicles manufacturers.
Since human's could not be teleported but human like android could be, Japan moved heavily into the robotics business. Companies like Toyota and Honda saw it as the next big thing.
Although, people still bought cars there reason travel was gradually decreasing. Since you get instantly buy anything on internet and receive it instantly, it became a cool thing to not go to shops. Brick and mortar retail was facing its biggest challenge yet.

One thing to note was that the initial hurdle to teleportation research was from the Oil industry, but now it had become clear that Oil and all Energy industries were the biggest gainers from this invention. Teleportation required energy and we still used the same resource, but in a different way. The ease of sending materials from one place to another became a big reason for increase in the frequency of such exchange, thus increasing the consumption of energy.

So what were the consequences of such wide economic upheavels...
Many became jobless and social conditions changed dramatically. Many became poor due to the stock market crashes for the traditional industries like shipping and manufacturing but many reaped the fruits of investing in new business models with teleportation at the core. There was another stock market bubble with many human teleportation companies opening up and it bursted when a global ban on human teleportation was announced.

The end result was the widening of the rich - poor gap and huge increase in unemployment. Riots were inevitable. There was a repeat of the Tiananmen Square in China but the most interesting thing was that no dead bodies were found...

Any guesses on what had happened?

Beam Me Up Scotty

2006-12-04T07:26:00.000-08:00

For all the Star Trek fans out there, the title is like a verse from the Bible. But has anyone wondered how a technology like the teleportation device alters our life Well next few of my blogs will be dedicated to this thought. So here goes the first one.

It all started with a certain Dr. Will Zapuinsky demonstrated the first ever Quantum Teleportation device based on the works of Charles H. Bennett and his team. Unfortunately his laboratory was completely destroyed due to a tragic fire accident while the good Dr. was working inside it. Some say it was the wrath of God; some blame the Aliens but mostly the finger points to the government and the Oil Lords of the world. However, no one can stop the scientific evolution and a barrier once broken does not take time to be broken again. Soon, the teleportation research took life of its own and no amount of intervention could stop its progress

An entrepreneur Dontele Porter established a company that delivered parcels to any part of the world within three hours by using the teleportation technology. The device was not big enough for large cargo but could deliver packets. Within few months he had become the biggest competition to the courier services. It did not take much time after that before this disruptive technology caught the eye of all major industry players. It was now clear to everyone that this technology can no longer be destroyed and only those who use it can progress. From oil companies to shipping to heavy vehicles manufacturing companies all got into the race of developing the next generation of the device that would deliver larger object through teleportation.

There was a revolution in manufacturing practices once the scientist and engineers realized that the device could actually be used to mass produce any type of object just from one prototype. This meant job losses at all levels in all industry and a total economic break-down and thus all governments banned the use of this device for manufacturing purposes. US secret service also tried to halt research on the human teleportation and many ethical questions regarding the same were promoted as the process involved destruction of the original life-form and replication of the life form. Animal rights groups protested against any such experiments on animals

Oddly, the first known successful human teleportation was done by a terrorist group that intended to take over the White House and tried to infiltrate through its teleportation device. The terrorists were shot naturally, but it gave US the perfect excuse to bomb all suspected terrorist sites and laboratories. However, the most remarkable twist to this saga was yet to come...

55 word Fiction

2006-12-01T06:37:00.000-08:00

These are two stories that I thought of for my Creativity class.

Story 1: Atom Bombs are good (52 words)
Mr. L was happy. He had convinced a group of young leaders of tomorrow the historic benefits that the invention of the atom bomb has brought. Those who thought it was the devil’s gift now believed it to be heaven sent. Mr. L smiled while caressing his tail. His job was done.

Story 2: Oh my! What have I done! (49 words)
It was an accident. How could I know that one small action could have such drastic consequences? Anyways I was under the influence of some toxic substance when this happened, so you cannot blame me for this. Look here, all I did was to say ‘Let there be light’.

Preface

2006-11-15T21:56:00.001-08:00

Hiya all neurons of this extended brain, oh sorry mind (did not get the domain brainExtension). This is going to be a space where I would like to share some of my thoughts. Finally, due to time constraint this space would probably be updated only once per week.