Thalesian Awareness

2500 years ago (624-547 BC), there lived Thales, in the Greek city of Miletus. Thales was a Greek Mathematician and Philosopher, who was often ridiculed and teased by his own people because of his penury. His humble existence was often questioned as his philosophy did not make him rich or bring him any wealth. Much of Thales's writings do not exist and we know of his existence purely due to Aristotle.

But Thales was a keen observer and thinker. Using his knowledge of Astronomy, Cosmology, Geography and Mathematics, he predicted a good harvest of Olives in the year ahead. To extract the oil from the Olives, one needed the Olive Presses. Thales stuck a deal with the oil-press owners(both in Miletus and also neighboring towns) to rent all their inventory of oil-presses in the future by paying them a nominal amount upfront, in return for the confirmed rental of the oil-presses at a discount. The olive-press owners silently laughed at the inherent naivety of Thales. It was a bumper harvest indeed, and by controlling all the oil-presses, Thales could effectively control the starting point of the olive oil production (a sheer monopoly) and became very rich.

Thales was probably the first Hedge Fund Manager who taught us Leverage and Forward Contracts, in the due course creating probably the first Monopoly for himself. Thales was the first to give us a financial derivative instrument - 'Futures' and 'Options'. He purchased the rights, but not the obligation to use the oil-presses. He would have lost the option-premium alone had the harvest been dismal.

Thales thus proved to the World that Decision Analysis and Systematic Reasoning when properly understood and applied, does indeed bring wealth; underscoring the Corporate Mantra that Knowledge when used can also bring profits. While crafting strategies, it is not always necessary that we restrict ourselves to the tried and tested models and frameworks. The much cliched 'thinking outside the box' is very much needed; and also keeps the grey matter engaged in the due course.

Thales observed his environment (context) with great detail and predicted with accuracy. He saw through things and extracted meanings that set him apart from his contemporaries. He was constantly watching and gathering insights that led him to his intellectual successes. He is said to have discovered Ursa Minor (Little Dipper) as a tool of navigation. He also theorized that the Earth is round, and not flat; along with many other fetes.

Thales's Analytic Thought Process coupled with Wisdom as a Profession made him one of the Seven Wise Men of the Ancient World.

Top-5 Videos Watched in May-2014

(In no specific ranking order)

1. Admiral Bill McRaven's Commencement Speech at University of Texas at Austin 

U.S. Navy Admiral and University of Texas at Austin alumnus Bill McRaven returned to his alma mater last week to give seniors 10 lessons from basic SEAL training when he spoke at the school's commencement. McRaven - the commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command and organized the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden.

Do not mistake this as just another 'commencement talk'; if India respected our soldiers and had the notion of 'commencement speeches' in our colleges, then am sure we would be hearing some of the best experiences from our borders, but till then, lets resort to the most developed nation doing the honors.




2. Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert) at IBM Connect 2014 
On the topic of success, based on his new book: How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.

Cartoonists are the new self-help gurus/motivational speakers with no sugar-coating and full of sense.




3. Simon Sinek: Why Leaders Eat Last

Why are leaders so so awsum? And why you should know the difference between 'leadership' and 'leader' and 'authority'.

4. 'What-If' by Randall Munroe (of xkcd)

Web cartoonist Randall Munroe answers simple what-if questions ("what if you hit a baseball moving at the speed of light?") using math, physics, logic and deadpan humor. In this charming talk, a reader's question about Google's data warehouse leads Munroe down a circuitous path to a hilariously over-detailed answer.

Something that many of us lack : Curiosity, Power of imagination and rational thought-processes.



5. Mike Monteiro - How Designers Destroyed the World

Profanity that makes so much sense! A must-watch for all 'makers', 'creators', 'innovators', 'designers' etc.



Bonus video:
Alberto Cairo(author of 'The Functional Art') , at Tapestry-2014, hits hard at the present day world of journalism and data-visualization.

Visualizing Funding of Companies in India

It all started with me trying to understand the funding scene in India and how companies are getting funded - at which stages, how much, from where and who are the primary investors. With this, the hunt for data started and culminated in the Crunchbase Exports(as on 1-Apr-2014). The data was structured well, but OpenRefine was used to cleanup the data - cities with typo in their names and different cases were clustered into simple buckets. Other than this, no other manipulations were done. The data, for India, mainly starts off from Jan-2005(and ends at Mar-2014) and there are a total of 1150 records contains various details of the investments made. I do not think this is an exhaustive list, but it was a good start to looking into it and getting answers to some of my questions.

Lot of cool visualizations can be done to capture the various insights from the data, but I think histograms do a pretty good job and are readable to a vast majority. Lets proceed...

The first was to understand the spread of companies across cities, and without even thinking twice, Bangalore simply wins with the maximum number of companies. A slightly distant second is Delhi(this includes Noida, Gurgaon etc - if the details matter to the reader).

It is imperative to know the funding obtained across cities, and here too Bangalore wins with 4.6B$ and Delhi comes a close second at 4.4B$.

Fortunately, Crunchbase contains the details of the funding type and the other associated details. The spread of funding - as in, the type of funding and the count of it was an interesting thing to see and followed the expected patterns of Angel being in the top-slots.

But, it is important to know how much money do these different funding types bring to the table, and the patterns just got reversed with Angels going off from the top slots. I think, it would be extremely useful if Angel occupies the top-slots - this would signify that the startup ecosystem has no dearth for money and many startups are getting benefited due to angels; it is to be understood that the quantum of money involved in one particular round of Series-b(and above) is substantially more and is not to be compared with that of Angels.

The following chart would be useful as it superimposes the number of companies with a particular funding and the sum of the money raised in that type.

Probably, the following chart would best show the point above. It average money involved in a particular fundting type and shows the average and the maximum in such a category. Seriec-C+ has an average of 45M$ and the max is 200M$ (Tokyo's SoftBank investing in InMobi); whereas Private-Equity has an average of 49M$with a maximum of 300M$ (USA's Quadrangle Group in Tower Vision).

The top investors are listed in the below viz with Tiger Global Management(TGM) being in the first slot with 718M.

But the above number starts making more sense when the reader knows that TGM has invested only in 10 rounds whereas IDG ventures has invested in 48 rounds.

Half of the investments(7.5B$ out of the 14B$ invested since 2005) are primarily coming from USA, with India itself coming a close second and many other developed nations occupying the tail.

With the above, it is an added bonus if we known when the investments came in and does this have any bearing. Though I have not yet done any correlation of when the investments came in(i.e which quarter) and the eventual success of the company, it is interesting to observe the pattern in the following chart. Q1 clearly is the winner with the maximum funding and also the max companies getting it.

And finally, if that was a histogram(bar-chart) overdose, lets use a Sankey Diagram to visualize the money coming from different countries and flowing into companies situated in different cities in India. This graph is actually interactive and width of the arcs shows the amount of money involved in the funding round and clicking on it takes to details - but for the sake of this blog post, a screenshot of it should probably end this analysis.

Click on the Image to view it in  full size.

Powerset ( Mathematical Pun )

Lot has been said about Powerset since its inception and blogosphere has not spared it either after its release in the recent past. Search is one of the toughest problems - given the magnitude and the sheer plethora of the information around. Though most of the blogs concerning the Powerset launch deal with how the management ended up having all the NLP grads(from Stan etc) and paid them 100k+ to develop this platform in SF; i will try to share some personal experience with this engine and how my expectations hasn't been satiated still.

Powerset was touted to be a Q&A engine with 'human' intelligence inbuilt into it. I was expecting some practical applications of Discourse theory too here. But neither were 'visible' in the experience that i had.

This blog is by no means a comprehensive review of the entire engine and its product strategy and the market segmentation brought on by Powerset, but sheer reflections of some emotions(read 'rants').

read on...

--> I was confused for a minute when i first saw the page result(search-hits) after doing the search for 'gandhi'. Now you need to understand when i say this that, i am referring to a 'typical' lane man who wants to search for some recipe or some term. There are just too many UI elements which can easily confuse your grand-mom.

--> I did a search for 'gandhi' and the results that i got were nowhere related to Gandhi(noun) but to the movie and the music bands and etc (in the tabbed bar above the Factz). Hence, i am not going to share what happened when i did a Q search (you may check other blogs for guys who did 'ask' question and the answers were a sheer 'mashup' of all the 'associated' keywords)!

--> The Factz were just too simple and i could not much gather anything from it, except for a solo fact which stated 'Quit India Movement'. The Factz look more like Powerset has simply searched on the n-grams gathered from all of the Wikipedia articles which has a 'rough' semantic association with the word 'gandhi'.

--> The widget on the right of the page (with delicious/reddit/et al links) is simply not required here. Atleast this could be made to bookmark the link with the search-word, but it instead bookmarks the powerset.com site. Anyway, I find this as a criminal waste of screen real estate.(But on a different note, this can be accommodated now, as Powerset has just launched and would be just interested in getting themselves bookmarked the max number of times - somehow, i don't subscribe to this PoV).

--> At the bottom of the page, the section on "Exploring the following pages on Powerset" is something that is simple but yet elegant. I would have preferred to see this result than seeing the Factz.(This is something similar to Sponsored Searches found in many other sites and corporate portals).

--> When you click on any of the result-hits, then the link opens in a new page ; which has an Article Outline on the right. Again, i simply would not even look at this - frankly speaking i did not even observe this, probably it was in my blindspot. Also, the way in which it slides when the page is scrolled - nice effect , but does not amaze me.

Concluding remarks:
# It looks like the entire is just an Alpha release , am sure that the Powerset team can collate its entire '(in)organic intelligence' and take this product to the next level; in the current release its a sheer play with ngrams and some named entity recognition (NER). Am sorry to say, but this does not look like the much-anticipated-Google/Live/Ask-Killer; in fact, not even closer to any of the latter. I would prefer Clusty.com to Powerset.

# Indexing all the wikipedia articles using Lucene/Solr, some NER and using the faceted searching would end up having almost similar results. I somehow opine that using simple algorithms and heuristics often ends up in having 'almost-similar' results than spending millions of USD and thousands of man-hours on developing a product that would be a step advanced than the former.

# Some bloggers have stated that Powerset can be a probable fit in the Enterprise Search space - but still solr+some-nlp-lib would be better of there (or use Google CSE ;) )

# Get the footer of the page properly aligned!!! It looks really bad in Firefox - The text "Privacy Policy" and "Except where" overlap badly.

......... And its not necessary that all sites have to be Javscript powered to give it a 'cool' look&feel .. simplicity rocks!

The Art of Downplaying (Part -1)

It is interesting to see when you let a person win over you, though you know that you can easily win her/him.

One knows that the other person is cheating him , but he still allows the person to cheat him. The cheater is fascinated by his abilities and the bovineness of the victim; the former is elated at his win. But what lurks in the minds of the 'downplayer'!!! No one knows! He loses to win again - return back with a greater impact and totally vanquishing the opponent. Like the phoenix that burns itself to reincarnate.

The Art of Downplaying is a fascinating field of human psychology that amuses me a lot. The complex calculations of a downplayer is very crucial, as his stakes are very high in this strategy. A single mis-calculation can lead to disastrous consequences with zero tolerance of returning back in the game. It is a very fragile and contentious issue and has to be trudged with utmost care.

I also forsee this as an excellent marketing and design strategy - again, with CARE. One announces market for a product , and the same person creates a dumb product (though, he has an excellent one waiting to ambush the market) and leaves it open in the arena. Many new competitors enter the arena. They fight among themselves building more dumb products and creating a huge market in the process; but our strategist lurks in the dark - he is outcasted by others for entering the market with a dumb product and is equally ridiculed. Suddenly, he turns around and announces the advent of the next big thing and creates a market upheaval. (Timing of the launch, type of launch, period of dormancy, timing and type of the re-entrance are the most important parameters here)

Its a check-mate :)

The Red Pill taker

The cliche goes :
" There are 2 kinds of people :
( i ) who look at things and ask '- Whats the cause for these to be in the present state? and
( ii ) those who look at things and ask - Why cant these be like this?
"

It is the Choice that matters the most. One who is able to understand the rudimentary problem and is able to make an effective decision considering all the constraints and the goal in mind will be 'The One'. The 'One' doesnt refer to a supra-human who can lift buses/trains and can fly in the air ; it refers to the thought process that a person posses by virtue of which he/she can conquer any problem at hand.This in turn reflects on the confidence levels and associated risk-taking abilities that one might have.

Understanding the case,constraints, possible solutions and framing a feasible course of action with the minimal risk factor can be said to resemble ANOVA(Analysis of Variance). A matrix of the constraints available and solutions would help us in doing a thorough analysis. It also helps us in framing the risk associated with each and every move.Decision Trees are a quick way of framing strategies with associated probability of success and risk.

Everyone is aware of these managerial tools; but it is the 'One' who can truly apply these tools in real-world problems and emerge with a most feasible and succesul solution. We all have been blessed with almost similar skills ; but the ability to understand the intricacies and making(and not chosing) the decision is what that counts.

I cannot restrain from quoting Lee Iacoca - "The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind."

The Isolated Frog Syndrome

The Isolated Frog Syndrome
----------------------------------

Before you start reading this text, let me make a disclaimer : I am not sure if the the term 'The Isolated Frog Syndrome' already exists in the English Vocabulary. If it exists then my most humble apologies to the author for inventing this 'beautiful' phrase - there was no intent of plagiarization over here...and I respect the IPRs of the author; However If the phrase does not already exist, then I do have the copyright(or left) of the usage of the word. However, for the sake of the general audience I have 'opened' the copyright so that you can use them in your day-2-day vocabs; But do give the credits to me for coining this rather 'funtastic' phrase which you will find tempting to use in various connotations.

Now coming to the actual phrase and wat it exactly means ...etc ..etc.........

My initial professional career in the IT Industry saw many ppl. I had the opportunity to work with the top brass.I learnt a lot of ppl management and 'handling' skills.It was during my stay here that I made an interesting observation. Let me share my revelations with you (am I sounding like the 'AGENT'...nway...) :

I found that the managers are essentially are of 2 kinds :

one who have the 'real' xperience - this they would have gained by working in various indutries and with a variegated working environment. They know the intricacies of the term 'management' and set a precedent by their style of functioning and working. They are leaders and managers in the true sense of the word.

The other class of 'managers' sprout from the relatively 'uncharted' waters of the industry...that is these are the managers that are homebred or homegrown. They would have become managers by due to the sheer 'lack' of compeitition in the firm, for which they have been serving since time-immemoorial.They have high visibility in the organization and can control(or rather 'handle') the resources with relative ease - due to their POWER.


The term 'The Isolated Frog Syndrome' denotes the second class of managers.The problem with this class of managers is that since they lack the vision of the outside world , they tend to feel and start practicing the traditions of the company; the irony here is that , it is in fact these ppl who set the traditions of the company. The result of this trend setting is that, if a fresher joins in this 'well'(the firm), then the 'frog'(who is our manager) directs him that the outside world is not what he thinks; in fact our frog doesnt even know wat is happening in the 'real' world. Due to this, if our buddy 'guest'(fresher) happens to question some of the rather idiosyncratic actions / behaviours of the frog, he is reprimanded and is reminded by the frog that he better confim to the culture of the firm(the well) and take the pride in being a part of this phenomenon.

But time has its own due course. One day our buddy(fresher), decides that he is going to have a taste of the outside world and going to seek 'nirvana' from the WELL.The WELL remains a mute spectator.