How checklist improves productivity in Delhi hospital

In his book, “Checklist Manifesto”, Atul Gawande of Harvard Medical School explains how a simple tool such as a ‘checklist’ can eliminate errors and prevent accidents and deaths. Gawande had helped WHO in developing a ‘safe surgery’ check list,  which was later implemented in different pilot sites all over the world.

While visiting the pilot sites, Gawande came across surgeries being performed in so many different kinds of settings. This is how he describes a charity hospital in Delhi:

The volume of patients they were asked to care for in this city of thirteen million people was beyond comprehension. The hospital had seven fully trained anesthetists, for instance, but they had to perform twenty thousand operations a year. To provide a sense of how ludicrous this is, our New Zealand pilot hospital employed ninety-two anesthetists to manage a similar magnitude of surgery. Yet for all the equipment shortages, power outages, waiting lists, fourteen hour days, I heard less unhappiness and complaining from the surgical staff in Delhi than in many American hospitals I’ve been to"

Twenty thousand operations per year handled by seven anesthetics means an average of eight operations per anesthetist for every single day of the year. That’s amazing. I wonder what their technique is. Do they use hammers? The check list for the anesthetist will simply read:

1) Sterilise hammer.

2) Put on surgical gloves.

3) Lift hammer from the table

4) Give a solid whack on the patient’s head.

5) Move to next operating table.

One shining moment....

A friend, in one of his introspective moods, told me, “Raj, let’s be honest. What have you and I achieved in this world? Have we done anything of any significance to anyone? When one of us dies, our entire life story will be summed up thus: “He was born, he lived and then he died” What else is there to write?

In that respect, Edith Shain is better off than either of  us. She suddenly became a celebrity, decades after World War II, asserting that she was the nurse kissed by a sailor in Life magazine’s memorable photograph of V-J Day in Times Square. That was her solitary moment of fame. She died last week. Here tombstone can read, “She was born, she worked as a nurse, she kissed a sailor and died”.

Or take the case of character actor Mac Mohan who died last month. He may have acted in 175 movies, but he is remembered only for his role of Gabbar Singh's sidekick Sambha in Ramesh Sippy's blockbuster "Sholay". That was his only claim to fame. His epitaph can read, “He was born, he was Gabbar Singh’s sidekick, then he died”.

I remember reading a news item many years back about a lift operator in a hotel. Apparently, a leading actress was staying in the hotel and got into the lift. The operator seized the moment to give her a hug. He was reported and was handed over to the police. Now, the poor operator could have gone up and down in his lift a million times and ended his career with nothing to report. But he had sterling stuff in him. ‘Carpe diem’, he shouted while grabbing his opportunity and..the actress. So, when he dies, his obituary can read, “ He was born, he operated lifts, he hugged a leading actress, then he died”. How many of us can claim to have such an impressive CV?

Belief in oneself

After being 8-14 down in the first game, Saina Nehwal fought back and won the finals of the Singapore Open yesterday. Later, she told a reporter, “At 8-14, I was nervous. Then I believed in myself and told myself to play my best and give my 100 percent. That worked for me”. When she won the finals of the Indian Open in Chennai last week, despite being a game down, she said the same thing about believing in ‘herself’.

Saina certainly comes across as a determined person and has demonstrated her grittiness on quite a few occasions when the chips were down.

But then, every sportsperson is trained to behave the same way. Her Chinese competitor must also have been told by her coach, “If you have a 14-8 lead, don’t relax. Go for the kill. And finish your opponent”.

If every competitor believes in herself, plays her best and gives off her 100 percent, as she is trained and mentally conditioned to do, then no match will come to an end. It will stretch on and on, with neither of the players giving in. The one who is leading will bring out her killer instinct, while the one who is trailing will show her fighting spirit, with both ‘believing in themselves’.

But then matches do end and someone does emerge the victor. In this case, was Saina’s 100 percent better than her opponent’s 100 percent? Or was Saina’s belief in ‘herself’ stronger than her opponent’s belief in ‘herself’?

Probably the simpler explanation is that history is written by the winner. The quotes that make it to the headlines are those of the winner’s. So, whenever Saina won she would have been quoted as saying that she believed in herself. And we remember those quotes.

The times that she lost, she wouldn’t have been quoted as saying, “I lost because I didn’t believe in myself”. Or, “I gave only 80% today”.

With reporters screaming for sound bytes, the ‘winner’ is expected to come up with a quotable punch line offering a clear explanation for her victory. It couldn’t have happened by chance. Surely, there was a plan in place and which was executed well? So, the poor sportsperson is forced to come up with these lines whether he or she believes in them or not.


Update 27/6/10: Well, by winning three events in a row, the latest being the Indonesian Open, Saina has demonstrated that her belief in herself is not misplaced. I like her 'quiet' determination, of the non-flamboyant, Rahul Dravid variety. May more such people succeed.

How pleasure works

Aware of my violent reaction if a song not composed by A.R.Rahman is played in my presence, my daughters try to test my loyalty by playing out an unfamiliar number and checking if I like it. If I happen to like the song and it turns out that it is not a Rahman song, or if I dislike a song that turns out to be Rahman’s, I am ticked off sharply.

Despite inheriting some great genes, these kids simply have no clue how the brain works. For their benefit, I am reproducing a quote from a book “ How Pleasure Works” by Yale psychologist Paul Bloom. (source).

As the founder and CEO of Perrier North America, it was important for Bruce Nevins to convey to people how good his product tastes. It was a bad day for him, then, when he was on a live radio show and asked to pick out the Perrier from a selection of seven cups of water. He got it on the fifth try.

There is nothing wrong with his taste buds. In blind taste tests, with waters at equal temperature, it is almost impossible to tell the difference between tap water and luxury bottled waters.

I would bet, though, that once Nevins left the radio show and went back to his life, he still thought that Perrier tasted really good - the radio test didn't prove otherwise. If so, he would be right. That is, someone who prefers the taste of Perrier to other waters but fails a blind taste test is not dishonest or confused. Perrier does taste great. It's just that to appreciate its great taste, you have to know that it is Perrier.

Got it, girls? To appreciate Rahman’s great music, you have to know that the song was composed by Rahman.

My country is the greatest.

An article by Priya Ramani on ‘our pseudo-nationalism’ got her a lot of hate mail and generated quite a buzz in the Twitter world. She wrote:

Recently I’ve become increasingly convinced that I’m not an Indian….. I have no furious loyalties to the Baganapalli or Alphonso. In fact, I can think of at least six fruits that I prefer to the mango. I have never eaten an entire paan or a pot of mishti doi (though I have tried both) and I don’t spit in public or private (except for that one time I tried a meetha paan)…. I don’t understand that other national obsession, cricket, either. White is not my favourite skin colour. I don’t read Chetan Bhagat or Paulo Coelho. I feel depressed every time I wear a salwar-kameez

I don’t think we’re the greatest people on earth. I don’t understand our sense of fake pride and nationalism. That whole chest-thumping Jai Ho phase? I never got it. Most of the insightful books and films/documentaries about India have been written/made by outsiders.

I agree with her about the chest-thumping and the constant proclamation of patriotism that we keep indulging in. When Sachin scores runs, he is not doing it for himself, but is sweating it out for his motherland. When Amitabh is acting, the last thought on his mind is money; he is working for the greater glory of the country and to keep the country’s flag flying high. Every morning these guys wake up and feel the need to say something profoundly patriotic on their blogs or tweats. (“My caste? I am an Indian”).

As Shaw put it, patriotism is the unreasonable belief that your country is the best merely because you were born in it. Being born in India was a random genetic event. Just accept it as a fact and move on. You don’t have to be proud of it, nor have to regret it.

Culpable negligence

Swaminathan Aiyer argues that the Indian Railways has caused more deaths than the Bhopal disaster and yet the public has not displayed the same degree of concern:

Consider Mumbai’s suburban rail services. Activist Chetan Kothari used the Right to Information Act to get data on people killed in Mumbai by the Central and Western Railway, which run through the city. Answer: 20,706 people have been killed in the last five years. This is six times as high as Bhopal’s 3,787 immediate fatalities and higher than even the long-term fatalities estimated at 15,000-20,000.

.. Union Carbide was lambasted for not using the best technology available to avert risks and deaths. But do we castigate the railways for not investing in the best safety technologies, and creating barriers to stop people from crossing the tracks? Union Carbide was slated for negligence in a shutdown plant. But the railways continue to be negligent year after year in a running organization that runs down people.

Many of us howled for justice after Bhopal. Many demanded the arrest of Union Carbide chief Anderson. Those convicted last week included Keshub Mahindra, the non-executive chairman with a largely ceremonial position. How many of us have demanded even the dismissal, let alone conviction, of the railway staff, Railway Board members or railway minister for the continuing holocaust in Mumbai? The non-executive head of the railways is, formally, the President of India. Has anybody demanded that Pratibha Patil be prosecuted for continuing railway deaths?

The Bhopal incident is certainly one of the worst and most tragic the world has seen. But, I also feel sorry for the plant engineers or managers at the Bhopal plant, who were convicted after a trial that ran for 25 years. What happened at Bhopal was an accident and not an act of terror with an intention to kill. But, the law says that negligence that leads to death is an offence. It believes that ‘punishment’ will act as a deterrent and reinforce the message that when safety of public is at stake one is obliged to be extremely vigilant.

But why scream for the head of Anderson alone? As any person who has undergone a basic course in Quality management will tell you, every accident can be traced back to human error. The Mangalore air crash was not an act of God, but caused due to negligence somewhere in the process. Did we ask for the arrest of the Chairman of Air India? The crane collapse at the Metro Railway site was a preventable accident. Did any Chairman get arrested for negligence? Each time we can demonstrate and prove that someone was guilty of an act of commission or omission.

As Aiyar concludes:

NGOs and the media suffer from a terrible double standard. They will pounce on negligence by a multinational, and rightly so. But they act as though the public sector has a licence to kill. That is disgraceful.

God and religion

The Crest Edition of today’s Times of India carries a series of articles probing the subject, “Does God exist?”. The usual arguments, for and against, have been put forward. Depending on one’s pre-disposition, one can find the material to agree with or disagree.

But the subject brought to mind some brilliant articles that I had come across in the website of “Edge, The World Question Centre”. Every year, Edge poses a question and invites experts from different fields to respond to that. The question asked in 2006 was, “What is your dangerous idea?” and some of the responses centred around God and religion.

Some excerpts:

In his article “Science must destroy religion”, Sam Harris, neuroscientist, warned that ‘religious tolerance” could help propogate absurd ideas and that it was as dangerous as religious war.

Despite the ecumenical efforts of many well-intentioned people, irreconcilable religious commitments still inspire an appalling amount of human conflict.

In response to this situation, most sensible people advocate something called "religious tolerance." While religious tolerance is surely better than religious war, tolerance is not without its liabilities. Our fear of provoking religious hatred has rendered us incapable of criticizing ideas that are now patently absurd and increasingly maladaptive. It has also obliged us to lie to ourselves — repeatedly and at the highest levels — about the compatibility between religious faith and scientific rationality.

 But Robert Provine, psychologist, talked about the futility of trying to resolve religious conflict.

Resolution of religious conflict is impossible because there is no empirical test of the ghostly, and many theologians prey, intentionally or not, upon the fears, superstitions, irrationality, and herd tendencies that are our species' neurobehavioral endowment. Religious fundamentalism inflames conflict and prevents solution—the more extreme and irrational one's position, the stronger one's faith, and, when possessing absolute truth, compromise is not an option

Scott Atran, anthropologist, feels that science must learn a few methods from religion if it has to win the battle.

Science treats humans and intentions only as incidental elements in the universe, whereas for religion they are central. Science is not particularly well-suited to deal with people's existential anxieties, including death, deception, sudden catastrophe, loneliness or longing for love or justice. It cannot tell us what we ought to do, only what we can do. Religion thrives because it addresses people's deepest emotional yearnings and society's foundational moral needs. Religion is the hope that science is missing.

Finally, Jesse Bering, Institute of Cognitive studies, says that it is impossible for Science to get rid of the concept of God and religion. It is something hardwired in our brains and made permanent by natural selection.

No matter how far our thoughts shall vault into the eternal sky of scientific progress, no matter how dazzling the effects of this progress, God will always bite through his muzzle and banish us from the starry night of humanistic ideals. 

Science is an endless series of binding and rebinding his breath; there will never be a day when God does not speak for the majority. There will never be a day even when he does not whisper in the most godless of scientists' ears. This is because God is not an idea, nor a cultural invention, not an 'opiate of the masses' or any such thing; God is a way of thinking that was rendered permanent by natural selection. God too is a biological appendage; until we acknowledge this fact for what it is, until we rear our children with this knowledge, he will continue to howl his discontent for all of time

A proof that the Hindus had the Binomial Theorem

The manuscript, “Asiatic Research or Transactions of The Society Instituted in Bengal for inquiring into the History and Antiquities, the Arts, Sciences and Literature of Asia – Volume II “, published in the year 1799, has a chapter, “ A Proof that the Hindus had the Binomial Theorem” ( page 487) by Mr Reuben Burrow.

An extract:

With respect to the Binomial Theorem, the application of it to fractional indices will perhaps remain for ever the exclusive property of Newton, but the following question and its solution evidently show that the Hindoos understood it in whole numbers to the full as well as Briggs, and much better than Pascal. Dr. Hutton, in a valuable edition of Sherwin’s tables, has lately done justice to Briggs; but Mr. Whitchell, who some years before pointed out Briggs as the undoubted inventor of the differential method, said he had found some indications of the Binomial Theorem in much older authors. The method however by which that great man investigated the powers independent of each other is exactly the same as that in the following translation from the Sanscrit.

" A Raja's palace had eight doors; now these doors may either be opened by one at a time, or by two at a time, or by three at a time, and so on through the whole, till at last all are opened together. It is required to tell the numbers of times that this can be done ?

" Set down the number of the doors, and proceed in order, gradually decreasing by one to unity, " and then in a contrary order, as follows :

8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

" Divide the first number eight by the unit beneath it, and the quotient eight shows the number of times that the doors can be opened by one at a time. Multiply this last eight by the next term seven, and divide the product by the two beneath it, and the result twenty-eight is the number of times that two different doors may be opened ; multiply the last found twenty-eight by the next figure six, and divide the product by the three beneath it, and the quotient fifty-six shows the number of times that three different doors may be opened. Again, this fifty-six multiplied by the next five, and divided by the four beneath it, is seventy, the number of times that four different doors may be opened. In the same manner fifty-six is the number of fives that can be opened : twenty-eight the number of times that six can be opened: eight the number of times that seven can be opened ; and lastly, one is the number of times the whole may be opened together; and the sum of all the different times is 255."

The demonstration is evident to mathematicians; for as the second term's coefficient in a general equation shows the sum of the roots, therefore, in the n power of 1+1 where every root is unity, the coefficient shows the different ones that can be taken in n things : also, because the third term's coefficient is the sum of the products of all the different twos of the roots, therefore when each root is unity the products of each two roots will be unity, and therefore the number of units, or the coefficient itself, shows the number of different twos that can be taken in n things. Again, because the fourth term is the sum of the products of the different threes that can be taken among the roots, therefore, when each root is unity, the product of each three will be unity, and therefore every unit in the fourth will show a product of three different roots, and consequently the coefficient itself shows all the different threes that can be taken in n things; and so for the rest.

Positive energy

“The positive energy of all my devotees saved my life” said godman Sri Ravishankar after the miraculous ‘incident’ in which a bullet missed him by a few minutes and a few kilometers.

Most charlatans and quacks resort to such terms as ‘energy’ and ‘ vibrations” to give their dubious teachings a scientific spin, but Sri Ravishankar is refreshingly different. He knows his thermodynamics. When he says ‘positive energy’, he knows what the term connotes.

Eric Schrödinger ( “What is life?) and later Eric Schneider ("Life as a manifestation of second law of thermodynamics") had postulated that the sole purpose of life was to disperse energy. Virtually all organisms, including human beings, are sunlight transmogrified waypoints in the flow of energy. They do so not by burning brightly and disappearing, like a fire torching a forest, but through stable metabolic cycles that store chemical energy and continually reduce the solar gradient. ( source).

Albert Einstein famously derived the equation that established the relationship between energy and mass. Applying the equation, Sri Ravishankar could easily calculate that the bullet weighing around 10grams, fired from a distance of 750 metres can be deflected by a few kilometres, by the collective energy exuded by millions of his sunlight-transmogrifying devotees.

What a man!

An open letter to my daughters

Dear Daughters,

I always thought that you Millenials (those born between 1982 and 2002), with your ubiquitous iPods and 24/7 e-mail access, were spoiled and pampered whiners whose self-esteem had been overstoked by anxiously over-involved parents like us and who were granted undeserved As from teachers. All this has made your generation profoundly narcissistic and made you unmanageable later in life. You’ve become over-confident, nay irrationally exuberant and are headed for a major crash. So I concluded.

Apparently, that’s not true. ( source)

Though your lack of humility is hard to digest, I understand that you are not necessarily maladapted. On the contrary with your inexhaustible well of positive self-regard, your refusal to have your horizons defined by the limitations of our era, you may end up being far more resilient than those of our generation.

Yes, we certainly knew how to shape you, didn’t we?

Everest, here I come.

Every now and then one gets to read about someone having climbed Mt Everest. As climbing the mountain, by itself, is no longer newsworthy, some other unique achievement needs to be tagged. This takes the form of “ first to climb from the Southern side”, "first Indian woman to climb Mt Everest”, “youngest Indian to climb Mt Everest”, “first from Tamilnadu to climb Mt Everest”, “ youngest woman from UP to climb Mt Everest”, “first to climb with a Supersuit on”, etc.

Without doubt, climbing the tallest peak in the world is a formidable task and a test of endurance. The achievement cannot be belittled. But, why the hell do these people do it? What are they trying to prove? What purpose does it serve? The novelty value is long gone and the story barely gets into the newspapers ( or even Reader's Digest). Is it to prove to oneself that he/she is capable of doing it? Why risk one's life to do it?

George Mallory is supposed to have replied “ Because it is there”, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest. If a thousand people after him give the same reply, it can get a bit tiring. ( As an aside, when a writer, I don’t remember who, was asked why he kept writing, he replied, “ because it isn’t there”.)

Soon, to paraphrase Yogi Berra, nobody will go to Mt Everest any more. It will be too crowded.


Update 29/06/10 : An article in The Telegraph explains the attraction of Mt Everest:

"Dr Tim Woodman, co-director of the Institute for Psychology of Elite Performance at Bangor University who has studied what motivates mountaineers, believes many climbers do it to fulfil a basic human need.

“A lot of people who climb mountains like Everest struggle to explain why they do it,” he says. “Mountaineers tend to be people who don’t feel in control of emotion in their everyday lives. Emotions are a basic human requirement, and mountaineering allows them to feel fear, a very strong emotion, and be responsible for controlling that emotion.”

This might explain why Everest still has such appeal. As the world’s highest mountain, it represents the ultimate challenge and battle against nature’s forces. "

Joined the twitteratti

I have been trying my hand at Twitter for the last few days and have found the experience fascinating.

If blogging is akin to an ODI game in cricket, and anything longer than a blog post comparable to Test cricket, Twitter is the T20 equivalent of writing. As in cricket, switching from one format to another requires a complete change of mindset. Not all can manage this transition well.

A blogger whose posts I used to like quite a bit, proved to be a crashing bore when he took to writing columns. He simply struggled to expand on his ideas and tended to ramble. When he became more ambitious and wrote a novel, I couldn’t get past the first few pages. He is now into Twitter too, but mercifully uses it only to provide links to his columns which I don’t read anyway. Clearly ODI is his forte and he should stick to it. Not for him the T20 game or Test cricket.

Even among famous authors, very few have excelled in both formats- the novel and the short story. I have found Somerset Maugham very good in both. P.G.Wodehouse was another. Arthur C Clarke, Roald Dahl, Ray Bradbury were brilliant with their short stories, but their longer ones or full-length novels failed to grip me.

At Landmark, the other day, I came across this book called Twitterature in which several classic stories have been retold in a series of Twitter-style messages ( about 20-30 of them per story). I believe that there’s also a book written solely in text-message format. Tailor-made for the limited-attention-span generation of today.

Vacuous and Verbose-18

In a statement , soon after the conviction of gunman Ajmal Amir Kasab and others, including Pakistan-based LeT masterminds Hafiz Saeed and Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, in the 26/11 case, Mr P.Chidambaram said:

“The verdict (against) was a clear message to Pakistan. “If they do (export terrorism) and we apprehend the terrorists, then we will bring them to justice.”

I would have slotted it at the top of the list of stupid statements of the year. Then I decided that this was more pathetic than stupid. The Home Minister is seriously under the delusion that terrorists who come here on suicide missions ( probability of death = >90%) would be deterred by the thought that they might get caught, tried, convicted and hanged to death ( assuming charitably that each step has a probability of 80%, the overall likelihood becomes 41%). And that people who send the terrorists across on suicide missions will also realize the folly of their ways and abort future missions.

But , as it is the stated policy of Plus Ultra to proffer solutions and to not merely criticize, let me make a suggestion that will guarantee success. Every terrorist who is caught should be subjected to regular, long sermons by the likes of P.Chidambaram, Abdul Kalam, etc. Now, if word gets around to other budding terrorists across the border that this is the terrible third-degree torture that awaits them if they are caught, it might make them give up their plans completely. (True, this might also induce them to put in extra effort not to get caught, but we’ll take that chance)

Woods number

That Tiger Woods had confessed to having 121 affairs is old hat. His wife, hereinafter referred to as Tigress Woods, had still let him off with a warning.

Recently, she seems to have learnt that Tiger Woods had not revealed details of his 122nd affair with their neighbour’s 22-year old daughter. This seems to have upset Tigress a good deal. (source).

At the time I am posting this, it is not clear what exactly has upset her. Is it the fact that Tiger had an affair with their neighbour’s 22-year old daughter? Or that he had had an affair with their neighbour’s 22-year old daughter? Or that he had had an affair with their neighbour’s 22-year old daughter?

What exactly are her objections is not material to this case. Or germane to the larger issue I am going to discuss. Suffice to note at this stage that the 122nd affair was the proverbial straw that broke the proverbial camel’s proverbial back.

For centuries, the male of the human species has been testing the marital waters, wondering what the threshold limit is when it comes to the number of extra-marital affairs one can get away with. Thanks to Tiger Woods, it is now known that the threshold is 121. Upto this magical number, the wife is tolerant ( “boys will be boys after all”). Beyond 121, she blows a fuse.

I propose that we refer to this number, henceforth, as the Woods number. It would be a fitting tribute to the man. Those of you who want to start a wiki entry on the subject may provide the definition that Woods number (121) is the number of affairs a man can safely have before his wife says ‘enough is enough’.

But wait. Just as Dunbar number ( 150 for human beings) can vary with species, can Woods number vary with race, religion and nationality? Is the number 121 valid only in the USA? What about India?

To establish the results following rigorous scientific methods, I invite male, married bloggers from India to participate in an experiment to determine the Woods number for this part of the world. Carefully document the affairs that you are having and allot serial numbers. When your wife files a petition for divorce, let me know the serial number of the affair that made that happen. I will add my own inputs and share the findings with the rest of you.

Vacuous and Verbose-17

"The Defence Minister Shri AK Antony has called upon the top brass of the Armed Forces to coordinate closely with various national cyber agencies and prepare crisis management action plan to counter cyber attacks and cyber terrorism….( source).

Referring to the use of large-scale energy resources in the Armed Forces, Shri Antony called upon the top brass to bring about strict energy conservation discipline. He also asked them to look for alternative sources of energy…

….he asked them to control the Revenue Expenditure in the Armed Forces by adopting various mechanisms such as increased use of technology, integration of the three Services, adopting joint training / procedures and uniform inventories. Shri Antony said there also exists considerable scope to improve the quality and efficacy of Defence Expenditure through increased Private Sector engagement, import substitution and indigenisation, improvement in procedures and practices and better project management within the parameters of the Government’s Policies."

I can imagine the scene. The Defence Minister making this long and completely vacuous speech, packed with motherhood statements,  and the ‘top brass of the Armed Forces” looking in his direction ( not the same as listening) with as much solemnity that they can pack into their facial expressions and nodding their heads in agreement, but praying that the damn ordeal would get over soon.

Heads of Army, Navy and Air Force are equipped to handle nuclear wars, infiltration, mutinies, terrorist attack, guerilla ambush, threat from inter-continental ballistic missiles and enemy aircraft carriers that have entered Indian waters, but I doubt if their training manuals provide them any tactics or weapons to counter such verbal volleys from Ministers. Just for their endurance of this torture, they deserve all the medals that they wear on their uniforms. I look at them with new admiration.

High-Fives and Ass-Pats.

A forthcoming paper by Michael Kraus and Dacher Keltner at UC-Berkeley investigates the correlation between "tactile communication" and success in the NBA. In essence, the paper demonstrates that "touchier" teams - and this includes everything from pats on the ass to high-fives - are also more likely to win. “Tactile communication, or physical touch, promotes cooperation between people, communicates distinct emotions, soothes in times of stress, and is used to make inferences of warmth and trust. Based on this conceptual analysis, we predicted that in group competition, physical touch would predict increases in both individual and group performance “say the authors ( via Frontal Cortex).

What I find incredible about this paper is that the researchers have sat through so many of the NBA games, observing if players are touching each other’s ass and if so, how many times, and concluding that the team that recorded the most number of ass-touching was more likely to win.

I wish I had read about this correlation, before IPL3 started. I would have spent my time more productively, keeping count of the tactile touches rather than the runs scored.

I could have used the sensitive information to make a killing off the bookies this season.

By the next season, I will come up with a counter that would record the number of ass-pats among the team members based on feedback from electronic sensors/transmitters secretly fitted on the backside of all players. As I mentioned in my previous post, this is an age of hi-tech data mining. Human observation alone will not do.

Numberology

The book “ Super Crunchers” by Ian Ayers explained how statistical evidence obtained through data mining is fast replacing human intuition in decision-making. “ Cutting-edge organizations are already crunching increasingly larger databases to find the unseen connections among seemingly unconnected things to predict human behavior with staggeringly accurate results. From Internet sites like Google and Amazon that use filters to keep track of your tastes and your purchasing history, to insurance companies and government agencies that every day make decisions affecting your life, the brave new world of the super crunchers is happening right now”.

Credit card companies use data mining extensively to send out the right mailer to the right group. If your spending pattern shows that you like Chinese food, they can send you a mailer when a new Chinese restaurant opens in the city. The connection will not even register in your mind, but you will be led subliminally to the ‘Wong Fu” or the “ Fong Chu” or whatever the new restaurant is called.

Now, the field of  data mining is getting far more advanced and nuanced. This article that I read (via) says that Visa Card can actually predict when someone is going in for a divorce. Other seemingly strange correlations have been unearthed from the data. Passengers who prefer aisle seats on planes spend more money on others than on themselves and so, I guess, will be the prime targets for ‘gift’ shop brochures.

Below the article, a commenter adds, “British airways are understanding consumer behaviour in a different light. Passengers now look to the airlines not simply as a mode of transport, but to catch on movies they've missed. That seriously resonated with me, am often guilty of that. With the average traveler facing a lack of time, behaviours shift with the passage of time and the way entertainment is presented will start to shift radically.”

Flights not as mode of transport, but as movie theatres! Where are we heading?

Is it all about computers/data/numbers/super-crunching? Is there no value to human intuition? A Little Birdy has commented on the article :

"After working for 10 years as a bartender and 20 years in the legal field, I can tell you that it's amazing the things that all people do and share no matter what their race, religion, gender or socio-economics. It's very easy to predict behavior. I used to be able to take one look at a couple who came in to the bar where I worked and tell if they were married, if so how long, if the were on their first date or if they were cheating lover and I could do it in about 60 seconds. We used to bet on how long it took for certain behaviors to occur.”

Thank you, Little Birdy. There’s hope for the human race.

Killer BMWs

“A speeding BMW driver ran over a 62-year-old morning walker near the Akshardham temple in East Delhi on Thursday morning”, reports the Times of India. The title of the story is " Speeding BMW kills elderly man".

As I wondered in a post earlier ( be warned that I have more than 650 posts up my belt and can link back to a post on any subject), why is BMW singled out for special attention? Was BMW responsible for the accident? Hell, there have been many accidents involving Mercedez Benz, Toyota Corolla, driven by rich kids, but these cases have not been referred to as the Toyota case or the Benz case.

An incident in Feb this year, in which a rich woman rammed her Honda CRV into a police jeep and killed two persons, has been reported by TOI thus:

A woman driving allegedly under the influence of alcohol rammed her car into a police jeep and a bike, leaving an assistant sub-inspector and the biker dead and four constables seriously injured early Saturday morning. A local court remanded Nooria Haveliwala (27), arrested for drunk driving, to police custody till February 5.

This is now being tagged by the media as the Mumbai drunken driving case, not as the Honda CRV case.

Curious.

Coward! Stop fighting elections, come fight us in the forests.

Calling the Maoists “cowards, Union home minister P. Chidambaram launched a direct attack on the ultra-left rebels and their front organisations during his first visit to their bastion at Lalgarh, in West Bengal’s West Midnapore district, on Sunday. “Why do they live in the forests? If they have courage, they should take part in democratic processes and face elections. Who is stopping them from winning elections?” ( source)

Of course, as Arundhati Roy would love to point out (and she has in a recent 32-page essay in Outlook, after spending some time in the forests, walking with the comrades), perspectives can vary. For the Maoists, living inside their forest may be a way of life. Why should they accept the Home Minister’s notion of courage – that of taking part in democratic processes and elections?

The Maoists can ask the question: “ Why is P.Chidambaram such a coward? Why can’t he step into the forests here, without his sten-gun toting Black-cats and settle things with a man-to-man fight?

In any case, why describe the Maoists as ‘cowards” of all things? You can call them anti-national, immoral, unlawful, unresponsive, unrepentant, etc but how can they fit the description of coward?

To quote Paul Krugman for the third time (earlier quoted here and here) from a column in which he was discussing President Bush's description of 9/11 as an act of cowardice.

“In truth, notions of "cowardice" and "bravery" are entirely irrelevant when we contemplate the horrors of terrorism. To call a terrorist “cowardly” is to substitute testosterone for morality. Somehow it isn’t enough to abhor an act of terrorism or even to promise to make the terrorist pay dearly. The rules demand that the terrorist be branded a sissy. This is not only a childish reflex, but one that weakens the moral force of the condemnation and thereby dishonors terrorism’s victims. After all, we don’t want brave people to slaughter innocent people any more than we want cowardly people to do so. Still, the public seems to demand that our presidents call terrorists cowards, and our presidents are too–well, cowardly–to deny them.”

Update 07/04/10: The post rather flippantly got into the semantics, but reading about the tragic event involving the killing of 74 CRPF men yesterday, made me reflect a bit.

“Bravery’ and ‘cowardice’ were traits that were part of a Code of Honour in the past. If one was labeled a coward, and therefore ‘unbrave’, that was the ultimate insult as per the Code of Honour. This code of honour was deeply implanted into the collective psyche and therefore was accepted unquestioningly. Whether it was the Samurai warriors fighting each other or the Kuruskshetra battle, the Code of Honour provided the coward-to-bravery scale to judge soldiers with. Even the thought that one was going to be described as ‘brave’ posthumously was enough motivation to take on the risk of dying .

Cut to today. How do you get people to sign up for the Army, when there is no Code of Honour that is held sacred by all? With money? No way. When you consider the high risk of being killed in the prime of one’s youth, soldiers get a pittance. And there are options of less-riskier and better-paying professions. So when you can’t lure them with money, you need to appeal to their sense of glory and fame- a modern day equivalent of the Code of Honour. And the glorification of military acts must be done relentlessly. Genuine acts of bravery do become part of legends and folklore. At the same time, a Commando-officer who meets his end at the Taj Hotel has to be called a ‘braveheart”, even if he did nothing spectacular in military terms. A Police officer who merely put on his bullet-proof vest and got shot after removing it must be spoken about in glowing terms. Vir Chakra and other awards will have to be bestowed too. The ‘brave’ image of the Army and the Police force must be kept alive.

To enhance the ‘brave’ shine of the Army, the ‘enemy’ must necessarily be branded a coward. The ‘terrorist’ who might have shown extraordinary daring to blow up a plane must be described as a pusillanimous poop. Maoists who carry out attacks with precision and with solid planning must be dismissed as cowards. This is the ‘done’ thing and the tradition must continue.

Off with the gown; hand me the Japee and the sorai

The no-nonsense Union Minister of Environment and Forest, Mr Jairam Ramesh, on Friday called the practice of wearing convocation gowns a “barbaric colonial relic” and removed his gown at one such event. (source)

“Why can we not have a convocation in a simple dress, instead of coming dressed up as medieval vicars and popes,” he asked, removing his gown worn over his trademark white kurta.

Two days after pocketing these swadeshi brownie points, Mr Jairam Ramesh went to the Guwahati Zoo to inaugurate the night safari. Here he was felicitated with a traditional Assamese Japee and Sorai, which the grinning MOEF donned on his head and clasped in his hands and sportingly posed for photographs.( source) 

If you will, for a moment, keep aside the swadeshi vs colonial angle , both the practices – that of wearing colourful, flowing convocation robes and the one of carrying the traditional Japee and Sorai can be viewed as meaningless and stupid. You can’t condemn one as barbaric and endorse the other as traditional.

That is because human beings have an innate need for rituals. Probably this shared belief in rituals improved the survival value of the race by providing a common purpose, even if the said purpose had no specific functionality.

Given this legacy, whether we are a tribal society in an island in the South Pacific or we are engaged in a Board Meeting in a Corporate office in London, we continue to observe rituals. Where religious rituals are absent, surrogate ones take their place. The Opening Ceremony at the Olympics serves absolutely no purpose, if you take a rational view; the organisers can start off straight with the events. But without the ritual and the pageantry of the Opening and Closing ceremonies, Brand Olympics will lose its shine and appeal. The changing-of-guards ceremony at Buckingham Palace or the daily show of saber-rattling at Wagah are other examples of ‘meaningless’ rituals calculated to capture people’s attention.

Sworn atheists in the DK and DMK parties in TN may frown upon religious rituals and label them barbaric, but they will not hesitate to garland a statue of their long-dead leader, forgetting the absurdity of venerating an inanimate block of granite chipped away to look like and symbolise a human being.

Those who get absorbed in the nitty-gritty of rituals and get lost in the symbolism would miss out the big picture and the larger social purpose. Equally, those who dismiss rituals as ‘barbaric’ or ‘medieval’ are only kidding themselves. They would be unconsciously observing several surrogate ones in other areas of their lives..

It is easy to ridicule the convocation ritual. But, without the attendant ritual and the induced air of solemnity, the aura will simply not be there and you will not find anyone attending. The graduates would rather take their degrees by mail.

If you object to the colonial hangover, replacing the robe with the “kurta’ won’t do. You must substitute it with an Indian equivalent that is ornate and resplendent in colours and hope that this will gradually become a tradition.

Update 26/04/10 : Santosh Desai, in a column in TOI today, expresses similar views.