Heartcrossings

Interesting article on the how spending conspicuously and recklessly can sometimes be a rational choice and how a frozen economy can be a boon for the fragrance industr y Unexpectedly, analysts say worsening economic prospects have fueled an interest in home fragrance. Youngsters are looking for affordable luxuries. Cars,   homes , and lavish vacations are out of the question — so it's all about $7 lattés in   beautiful cafés   and the   "natural toothpaste craze," which ushered in $13 tubes of toothpaste. It makes sense to live in the moment when there is no future to dream of that warrant sacrifices and saving.This is not a lot different than what happens when a person of any age who goes through a dark and hopeless phase. In the best case, they may want to live the best present life that they can - travel, gather experiences, buy things they would have consider indulgent in more normal times. They could do much worse if severely depressed over their conditi...

My friend S and I were discussing why and how our kids have largely missed out on reading the "big" novels that define the last couple of centuries of world literature. Why it was much easier to read them back in our day. One of the thoughts we had was around the relative distance between the reader's life and that of the cast of characters in the novel. When the distance is too great then the ability to relate is diminished and the interest in the story wanes. In pre-internet days, when access to information was limited and the world was vast and unknown, the concept of this distance applied very differently.  As a teen reader I was as far away from the Napoleonic wars as I was to the the Gupta and Maurya campaigns I read about in history class. Similarly the events of the day reported in the newspaper seemed infinitely remote from my life- there was no way to interact with those who were experiencing the falling of the Berlin Wall for example. There was no social shar...

I had chance to visit a beautiful country just for a few days recently and added a tiny bit to my collection of rocks, shells and driftwood - things I collect everywhere I go. When possible I try to find locally made perfumes or essential oils. Local jams, preserves and wines  tend to be on my list too. The act of returning to tactile and sensory things from places I have been revives my memories the best. J commented that she is glad these things "spark joy" for me. Indeed they do.  The first memory I have of a beach was visiting Pondicherry as a child. It was also the first time I collected a large number of shells and smooth pebbles. I remember arguing with my parents that they were all beautiful and very special and so I needed to bring them all home - after some resistance they gave in. There were soaps, cologne, candle and incense sticks my parents brought home from that trip. We used all of that very sparingly so we would have them to remember the trip by. That was...

Each time I bite into a nectarine takes me back to the time when I had just arrived in America. This was the first fruit I ate that I had never tasted before. As the skin breaks in my mouth and the flavor of the fruit takes over, it triggers memories of long ago days. We would have been been married twenty years now - the man who introduced me to this country and modern Bengali poetry at the same time. There are many good memories of our brief time together for which I am grateful.  The years have dulled the pain of the bad ones which had been more numerous and intense. It is fortunate that I don't have clear recollection of the irreparable disintegration of our marriage. My selective amnesia allows me to remember happier times - sharing a nectarine, unplanned road-trips, visiting yard-sales and listening to Bob Marley CDs in his beat-up car which was also the first one I ever drove. It was prone to inopportune over-heating and we would need to step out and let it cool off. To hi...

Stephen Hawking might have seen things that are decades out when he warned of the perils of AI - the larger, grander view of the world that is not accessible to most average people. Those are words of caution to be heeded. Even in the most mundane of AI applications that I run into given my work, the perils are plainly evident. The simple business of sentiment analysis for example can be fraught with trouble that were never anticipated. The accuracy of many models depends on the the data used to train it. The more comprehensive the training set the better the quality of results. In a sentiment analysis problem, the biases of the subject matter experts assigning sentiment scores to free form text in the training set forms the guts of the model.  It is not very hard to sway results in specific ways to achieve desired outcomes. If the results of the sentiment analysis for example were to be associated with financial outcomes for the those requesting such analysis, it is easy to see ...

Fun article about Bonobo mothers and sons . This is a lot like an arranged marriage aimed at producing grand-kids with desirable attributes. It is not clear how the interruption prevention is achieved by the Bonobo moms and its interesting that the boy's mother is in the driver's seat much like a lot their human counterparts.  Wonder why the mothers of female Bonobos are not out there scouting suitable boys and making sure they stay with their daughters. The desire for cute grand babies should be equally strong for all females of a certain age. If researchers could figure out why the mother's of daughters were taking on a passive role in Bonobo society, maybe there would be something for us humans to learn from it as well.

Interesting solution to the selective college admission problem - to resolve it by way of lottery . While there are many logically sound reasons to take this approach, I can't see the incentive for the college. The perceived exclusivity comes from the notion of uber premium. It is not enough to be excellent but more excellent than the other excellent students. Once all that has been accomplished the most excellent of them all will likely experience the dreaded impostor syndrome because they cannot understand their extreme excellence. A lottery system would definitely ease that pressure.  Though pretty devastated at the time for not making it to the top school, I learned over the years that I was very lucky not to have been anointed the most excellent of them all. It helped me fail and fall without fear and dust myself off and try again.My peers who ended up being the "chosen ones" did not have it nearly as easy. The pedestal was forever shaky and they never stopped over...

Very useful reading on the addictive patterns  built into UX to make content sticky. One that resonated most with me was design to trigger the fear of loss  "A common tactic used by e-commerce sites–especially travel and hotel booking sites–is a window that pops up saying “45 people are also viewing this product/property/reservation.”  I am notoriously bad at planning vacations. A week ahead of the date of departure would be quite remarkable. So it is no surprise that I encounter many such random numbers warning me that my luck will run out in minutes as I try to book flights, hotels and more with two days to spare.  It always struck me as odd as to how many people were fighting for this one deplorable room in a pretty unremarkable hotel exactly for the duration of my rather odd travel dates. The social engineering aspects of this design trick are too obvious to miss and yet in a high stress situation it might make a person click that buy button.  The fi...

Interesting use of neural networks to detect high school essay cheater s. A valid use case no doubt. I like the secondary use case even better - to identify students whose writing is not maturing at the rate expected given the number of writing assignments. In large classrooms where a teacher cannot possibly know each kid's progress curve, technology like this is a great help. It would be interesting to try similar methods to predict trouble in other areas of our lives. The breakdown of communication between people is often a slow and imperceptible process. Instead of heading to therapy long after the the damage is done, it would be nice to have early warning signals of things moving south. Both sides could recover lost ground with each other quicker, not be trapped into obdurate conversation patterns. There is only so much Five Love Languages can remedy.

Nice essay which among other things talks about the commodification of the word friend in the modern world . Back in the day, I remember being "purist" as far classifying someone a friend. Between age four to twenty there had been five people who I called my friends. The determination was mostly made on the basis of my answer to the question - what is the most I would be willing to do for this person no matter the consequence to me. Two of them have remained friends to this day. The other three dropped off my life due to circumstances neither of us controlled. I still think of them fondly and if ever we were to reconnect, I believe it would be like we had never parted ways.  Which leaves a whole slew of people who have been part of my life, shaped and influenced it in more ways than I can count. Are they not friends because I would not be able to answer the operating definition question so assertively? Their value and contributions cannot be underestimated just because I a...

I have increasingly become a reluctant participant in the women in STEM initiatives that I get pulled into mentor at sometimes. As much as I want to help these young ladies love and learn subjects I am familiar with, I don't see these events as serving useful purpose. The girls are being shoved there against their will and the lack of interest and ownership is all too evident. It is also true that J veered off of STEM just because other subjects interested her more. The love of math, the curiosity about physical sciences was not enough for her to envision a career and future in STEM. She felt her passions and talent lay elsewhere. I meet lot of girls like J who make for unwilling and disengaged mentees until I ask them about what they really love doing. That is when they light up and start to talk. This author is right that such initiatives are failing both STEM and the girls . There should be no shame or stigma attached to not wanting a career in STEM and worse to attribute that...

Breathtakingly beautiful furniture and an interview the creator . What John Makepeace says about the design as relates to furniture is probably true about all forms of individual expression - be in the work we do, the lives we live, the causes we hold dear and the friends we make and keep  Design is a about communication. And a certain amount of communication that is run of the mill if fine, but actually in a world where there is more communication you do need to be able to shout and to stand out of line, because that's actually a raison d'être for an individual. We don't want to sublimate our identity, so to me it's really important that there's an integrity to yourself, whatever that might amount to.

When I was growing up, I often heard my father talk about the struggles of his childhood and youth. Too many mouths to feed not enough money, no home and no land. They worked with what they had and worried constantly about tomorrow and the day after.  There are things about him that I did not understand then and still do not. Why for instance, it is so hard for him to be optimistic, why he cannot overcome his many irrational fears and why he only expects to hear bad news from everyone he cares about. I treasure the streaks of lucidity I have encountered where I glimpsed his full humanity until the clouds of gloom took over.  I like to believe that is my "real" father, the rest is who his circumstances turned him into. Reading this poem by Naomi Shahib-Nye struck a deep chord for me My father couldn’t swim either. He swam through sorrow, though, and made it to the other side on a ship, pitching his old clothes overboard at landing, then tried to be happy, make a new li...

Interesting reading about the lack of compromise and its relationship to dictatorship as Jared Diamond sees it. On a much smaller scale, in relationships between partners or parent and child, this seems to ring true.  Say in a bad marriage, there is no agreement on any issue whatsoever. This naturally leads to a severe imbalance of power with one ruling and the other ruled. When you add to that disparities in income potential and other constraints that limit the freedoms of each, the divergence only grows stronger. From a collaborative, egalitarian ideal of relationship we quickly devolve into something that does resemble a dictatorship.  In parent-child relationships the outcomes could be very dire for the child if an extreme, authoritarian, no-compromise parent refuses to listen to any views that contradict theirs. In either situation, it takes time for the the balance of power to skew until the relationship is irreparably damaged. So the ten year time-line that Diamond...

My friend S came over for a couple of days because she needed to take pause. Her life has been more than usually challenging lately and not all problems can be resolved. That is a hard thing to make peace with for a person as take-charge as S. Among other things she talked about guilt over not feeling love for her mother while she was alive and not actually missing her now that she has passed. S described this void in her heart that nothing will fill - the place where that love should have been and now grief. In the absence of all that she feels as if her very humanity is challenged. This is not so uncommon a problem.  Comes a time in many of our lives when we grow so far apart and away from our parents that we feel no closeness. And with that comes the desire to overcompensate by frequent contact without any true feeling. Each such encounter leaves us feeling guilty - questioning why we cannot muster genuine love and care for those who gave birth to us, who raised us the best th...

A lot is being written about Facebook's foray into crypto-currency, Libra. This piece of on Huffpost echoes my sentiments exactly ..what Facebook is proposing is a really stupid investment scheme masquerading as a digital currency. It’s a proposal that immediately demands regulatory scrutiny of Facebook from every financial authority in the world. For a company that has spent the past two years engaged in mass privacy violations, accidental corporate alliances with authoritarian agitators and livestreams of outright terrorism , Facebook’s attempt to enter the world of high finance with so slipshod an idea can only be described as delusional. There is only a slight problem with this delusion as it concerns the rest of us. Facebook has mastered doing gross wrong, being in denial and then faking contrition in that order. So far there have been few if any consequences for that. We all collectively marvel at the imperial hubris of Zuckerberg and he continues doing even more egregio...

My friend D who I have known for over fifteen years now, is very quick to misunderstand and get offended. Sparing her feelings takes a lot of deliberate effort. Over the years, I have upset her several times. For the major offenses, I have allowed over a year long to cool off. In every instance she bounced right back, we were able to get along as if nothing had happened. The issue (if we still remembered by then) was discussed and resolved. A lot of time was wasted in this process in what is already a busy life for both of us. J asked me the other day, how and why I do it.  There are "easier" people out there that do not take this much trouble to get along with. And she is right - D is the antithesis of easy. Yet, it always made sense to put in the work she takes in a friendship. I am not sure why it does. Maybe she reminds me of other people in my life who pose challenges and yet cannot be excluded or ignored. Knowing that my obligations are much more limited with D allows...

Have been reading about the water crisis in Cape Town for a while and now t his extreme solution of dragging an iceberg over. Specifically, the experts plan to wrap the icebergs in special fabric to stop them melting, then attach them to large ships that would tow the ice up the Benguela Current, a South Atlantic Ocean current that flows northward along southern Africa's west coast. Iceberg towing is not a new idea apparently but that does not redeem it from wackiness The crazy scheme side of the iceberg towing industry continues apace. And the breathless media reporting on such things continues as well. This is one of these ideas that no matter how many times you repeat it remains some wild guy's wacky idea

Wearing clothes for social media sounds like a very odd predilection. Specially that the said clothes have no use beyond being a picture on Instagram. The return culture stemming from such is encouraged by retailers. When you add try before you buy to this, retailers allow shoppers to borrow their wardrobe at low cost and if they are smart even for free. A lot of ink is spilled on consumer behavior or how it changes over time with some trends too powerful to reverse. At the root of all this misery is the the notion of building a better mouse-trap to ensnare the feckless consumer. So retailers play around with different inducements to see what we might bite. If they trap us they may command our loyalty at least for a while - eventually we escape anyway. All the while we gorge on freebies that someone way down the food-chain is paying for in the form of longer work hours, depressed wages and no benefits. That is the cost of our collective desire to look spiffy everyday on Instagram.

This article about our bodies adapting to our life-style talks abut spiky things growing from the base of our skulls because our heads are constantly bend over screens as we text. This is how it happens apparently: When we’re sitting upright, these hefty objects are balanced neatly on top of our spines. But as we lean forwards to pore over famous dogs on social media, our necks must strain to hold them in place. Doctors call the pain this can cause  “text neck” . Shahar thinks the spikes form because the hunched posture creates extra pressure on the place where the neck muscles attach to the skull – and the body responds by laying down fresh layers of bone. These help the skull to cope with the extra stress, by spreading the weight over a wider area. Maybe this is for the best. Even if this were completely fake news, we can still scare our kids out of being slave to texting by pointing out to horns they are growing as a result of it. The author concludes that given our strange...

Good article on the scam that is the personal finance advisory business . I have at various points in my life come into contact with zealots who have drunk the kool-aid in the form a book or a podcast by one of these gurus that want us to believe that giving up coffee and avocado toast will have us retiring in the French Rivera. The math of the retirement savings plan never makes sense when adjusted to reality. The author rightly points out: Personal finance is the prosperity gospel of cable news, happy to claim that you’ll end up with all the money if you listen to its experts, take their advice, buy their book. Not buying coffee won’t magically get you a house. Not buying avocado toast isn’t a retirement plan. I do drink coffee, love Avocado toast and get my hair cut professionally. That has me committing the trifecta of sins that lead people to financial ruin per the gurus. The real savings I find come from skimping on much bigger ticket items. The things to avoid in my expe...

Yet another example of new technology developed for misguided reasons . Why does it help to have kids initiate purchase decisions and put them in a confrontational situation with parents who may not approve?  Amazon  will now allow developers to offer premium content for purchase in Alexa skills aimed at children. The company on Friday introduced new tools for building skills with in-app purchases that requires the Amazon account holder — typically mom or dad — to approve or decline the requested purchase via a text or email. The skills that Amazon is destroying in the process is for kids to interact with parents and others in person, without requiring Alexa to mediate for them, without needing approval via text and email from their parents. Historically, when a kid needed something, it was common to discuss it as a family with others weighing in, trade-offs being discussed and compromises being agreed upon. Sometimes, the request could meet with approval and sometimes not...

Fascinating article on the reach of WeChat in the lives of its users . The author says it most poignantly " WeChat has metastasized into every aspect of people’s lives in China".  What is true of WeChat is also true of other companies in the same space It is the ultimate in data centralization and because of the nature of the digital economy the more data it has the more efficient it becomes—and the more easily it can pivot into new markets. The intent is to use WeChat as the foundation of the social credit system. The vision of which is Orwellian to say the least Under the pilot scheme, people with outstanding court orders or who have defaulted on loans can’t book high-speed rail tickets and can’t fly in planes.

Reading this Atlantic article on the relevance of 1984 made me want to re-read the book. The last time was too long ago. With life imitating art though, you have to wonder if it is still possible to parse out the bare bones genius of the novel anymore.  Such was the experience of watching the movie Network recently. So much about the movie made in 1976 is true about the world today, that is easy to forget that such prescience was brilliant.  When one of the characters in the move lays out his world view " There are no nations. There are no peoples ... There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business." Today you can no longer pretend this is satire. 

Recently,  I was invited along with a few others to interview a data scientist. The candidate was going to present one of his past projects so we got a sense of his skills and experience. Generally, all good ideas except one thing. The candidate was more qualified and credentialed than all of us put together. If I was in his shoes, I may have felt insulted that such a motley crew was going to make a determination about my abilities. While its nice and magnanimous of this person to submit to such unqualified scrutiny, it made me wonder what if any assessment we could possibly make regarding his fitness for purpose.  This incident also made me think about the state of data science and its disconnect from the lay people whose problems and questions it is supposed to answer. Once the mechanics of how the data is used to arrive at the answer becomes so complex that the person asking the question has no way of validating the approach from a commonsense perspective, the solution is...

Not sure what geniuses are in charge of the Uber website. But try to log-out after signing in as a rider and if you figure it out under ten minutes then you are a genius yourself. Basic rules of usability don't seem to apply anywhere. Not sure who they focused grouped this thing with if at all. It may well be that the semi-working wireframe got pushed to production by accident. The whole experience of being lost in a maze trying to log out made me wonder if this is the outcome of the way kids are "loving STEM" these days and building random apps based on a some quarter baked idea and winning hackathons for their efforts - feeling like they have ascended to the top of the profession. The rigor of actually learning computer science, the core tenets of programming etc are irrelevant to taking the love of STEM to an app that seems to work until you try to do something real with it.  In the case of Uber, the app itself mostly works but the website is an unmitigated tra...

Long article on five lessons from history but totally worth reading. The author Morgan Housel's style is reminiscent of Mary Meeker's Internet Trends report of which I am a fan like many others. His subject matter is different and he covers a large time-scale, full of events - some grand others not so much.  There is a lot to take-away from this article, but my favorite lines were: If enough people believe something is true, unsustainable ideas can gain durable life support. Stories are more powerful than statistics because they take less effort for your brain to contextualize complex issues There are so many examples all around us of "unsustainable ideas" that "gain durable life support". It could be in the the microcosm of a family unit where everyone believes that one of three kids is the smartest. Its a myth that becomes reality with go good basis. Stories start to form around it and at some point it is reality. On a larger more societal scale, w...

Nice NYT article on what it means to be a witch . In summary, it would be a person who can focus their energy (or prayers) towards a certain outcome. All examples this author cites are positive though who can tell what is positive on an universal scale when one person choose to intercede with destiny for another.  On the face of it, there is no harm in bringing two shy people together so they may kiss. But it could set of a chain of events that would not have otherwise occurred. The outcome of those events could be positive or not. None of this is much different from what follows from prayers and supplications to some divine power. When prayers are answered there is no knowing what will follow from there if that will be as gratifying. There is a reason why every culture has some variation of the three boon fable. 

It is nice to see that some banks are trying to step in and break the vicious cycle of poor mental health and financial troubles . Monzo uses plain language in all customer communications, gives customers control over which notifications to receive, allows them to set budgets, opt out of lending at the point an account is opened and turn off lending promotions. It also allows customers who are struggling with debts and their mental health to “take a break” from communications about their debt while they focus on their recovery. This is where perhaps the commodification of prediction which is generally a topic fraught with hand-wringing could help in good cause. If banks can predict the onset of mental health problems before they financially paralyze the customer, maybe they could come up with interventions to avert a full on-crisis. Perhaps they could paint the picture if what is to come financially based on their analysis of cohort data. That early warning sign maybe enough impe...

Recently I was seated next to a mother with two young boys in a flight. The five year old was by the window, she had the one year old on her lap in the middle. Both kids were cute and noisy in a happy, playful way. It is unlikely they were bothering anyone in the nearby seats - certainly they did not bother me. It was interesting to observe how the mother thwarted the older one by getting him busy with video games on his iPad and the younger one was shushed non-stop until he gave up resisting and fell asleep. It was a three hour flight and they boys were not heard from after the first hour. Given that both kids were even keeled and were not being a menace to society, perhaps there could have been an other way to manage them without killing their natural energy. The older one seemed to be a bit of a rhymester. He made up phrases that seemed to amuse the little guy who hummed tunes now and then as he played with his brother. Would it be so wrong to let these two kids find a way to en...

Wonderful article on how the author became fluent in math at an older age and how she used her skills with learning languages to do it. She explains the process beautifully: When learning math and engineering as an adult, I began by using the same strategy I’d used to learn language. I’d look at an equation, to take a very simple example, Newton’s second law of  f  =  ma . I practiced feeling what each of the letters meant— f  for force was a push,  m  for mass was a kind of weighty resistance to my push, and  a  was the exhilarating feeling of acceleration. (The equivalent in Russian was learning to physically sound out the letters of the Cyrillic alphabet.) I memorized the equation so I could carry it around with me in my head and play with it. If  m  and  a  were big numbers, what did that do to  f  when I pushed it through the equation? If  f  was big and  a  was small, what did that do to...